Tri Lingualism and Speech Delay

Would agree with most the posters here.

Our kids are exposed to 3 languages regularly (Thai, English and Cantonese).

The eldest, who turns 3 soon, was behind his peers at his playgroup in English language skills. We did get worried especially as his main teacher expressed concern and advised sticking to one language.

However, in the last few months he has started to string small phrases together and has a decent vocab in both Thai and English for sure. cantonese is his lowest exposure but they will get more now he's started kindergarten.

I think our initial impression that he would be slower to begin with but will end up stronger in languages will come through, but there will always be moments of concern until proevn.
 
Multi-lingual Children

I completely agree with Lollipop - my opinion is don't stop. Our daugher is 3 yrs and speaks English and German fluently - but she was "behind" her monolingual peers if you want to make comparisons of how much she could speak at what age - but she did understand everything. ne day - not all that long ago it just clicked. She went from mixing up English and German in the same sentence to speaking them both fluently. The best advise we were given was to have the parents (for example) each stick to one language rather than going back and forth between two because that apparantly creates some confusion. From birth my husband has only spoken German (his mother tongue) to our daughter and I have only spoken English (my mother tongue) - she responds to both of us in "our" language. As we just moved to HK she has now started in a bilingual pre-school with English and Mandarin - it has only been a few days but she loves it! Good luck to you!
 
Have found these posts reassuring....my son is exposed to two first languages as my husband and I have different first languages and it is very important to us that he spoke both, especially as my husbands family speak very little English (my first language) and so to really be able to communicate with them it is important that our son speaks their language. Not only that but I think it's a gerat skill to have. I agree you should not stop teaching a child a language because they will be confused....I read that by 5 years old children who may have had speech delays due to being exposed to more than one language will have caught up with their peers...except they will actually be beyond their peers because they will have the benefit of speaking more than one lanuguage!


He's only 10.5 months and I have worried a little over his speech development, although I shan't anymore....he can say Mama (English) and Abba (which is daddy in my husbands language) and that is about it- he speaks non stop, we just don't understand it!

Is that true Cara- babies either walk early or talk early. My 10.5 month old is now walking by himself- he doesn't need to hold anything. Will be interesting to see how his speech develops!
 
that's always been my experience.

they seem to need all their powers of concentration to master one skill first, then they move onto the next thing...

my almost 7 month old has been crawling for 3 weeks...wonder if she'll walk first or talk first???
 
Hi There. I am a Developmental Psychologist, and this has been an area of interest of mine for the past few years.

There is a vast amount of cognitive psychological research which strongly suggests that children being exposed to 2 or more languages during the langauge development years will initially slow their language production (not understanding), but that once they start speaking in their own time, their language use is not adversely affected, except that initially they tend to mix languages in together.

Exposing your child to three languages means that he/she will develop the cognitive architecture required for all three languages, which will give him/her more "hooks" to hang language on in the future - in other words, if you know 3 languages it is much easier to learn more, but if you only know one language it is harder to learn a second.

I'd say yout child is extremely fortunate to be exposed to such diversity!
 
I have big problem with my son's speech delay. He was exposed to 2 language from birth. His development was normal except for his language skill. By 18 months he appeared to not understand any language at all (eg. simple instruction, calling name, pointing). Doctor even suggested that he has autistic features, which is very depressing for us. After that we spent lot of money on language therapy and decide that we will switch to 1 language only. Now he is 2.5 years old and start talking in 2 words combination.

Billingual experience to us is a hauting and expensive one!
 
i'm sorry that your son is showing some autistic features.

these features however are not caused by using 2 languages at home.

it is also a different situation for children with these features to try to learn two languages. i do know some children with these features that CAN speak and understand 2 or 3 languages, but their speech was VERY delayed. They didn't start speaking until they were about 4 years old. Their mastery of their mother tongue is far superior to their skills in their second and third languages, but they are able to converse quite well in all three languages. the child that i'm referring to is very highly-functioning on the autistic spectrum. and is now in a regular ESF school with only 1 learning support class per week.


good luck with your son!
 
Thanks carang.

After he was 20 months, we decided to switch to 1 language only and he has shown positive progress. All the autistic features disappeared. He is a little chatter box now although he could not say long sentense yet. He is a happy boy, always wants to go out, especially show interest in interaction with other children of same age. We are happy too. I'm thinking about should I introduce the second language again, this 2nd language is my mother tongue, and English (the language of my son now) is my hubby's first languge.
 
hi there, very interesting to read this thread. I have been through the same experience as many of the parents here, with trying to teach my son cantonese and english at the same time. DS used to spend a lot of time with grandparents and spoke fluent cantonese. I was worried that his English may be delayed but now he started preschool, he speaks English fluently. Actually I have noticed that he is starting to lose the chinese. Hubby always tries to remind me to speak to him in chinese.
My questions for those in HK (who may have access to more material in chinese preschool education): are there any good chinese storybook and DVD, other than the disney-based ones? It's so much easily to find good story books in english - DS loves to read and we spend a great deal of our bedtime routine reading. I would love to introduce a few chinese books but never come across any. Is there anything I can buy online?
 
I would recommend the 'I Can Read Myself' series published by Greenfield. The stories are very simple but interesting. I've been using them with my own children and also in my playgroups. Purchase can be made online (www.greenfieldhk.com), but I'm not sure if they accept overseas order.

There're also simple story books ('My First Chinese Words' series)published by Better Chinese (www.betterchinese.com). These books are used in some international schools as supplementary reading materials and there's a computer disc that goes with them.

Linda
 
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