13.10: Native Language Development in Non-English Languages
- Page ID
- 173840
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Development for Non-English Languages
If you work with infants and toddlers, you may have children who are learning more than one language. Infants may be exposed to one language, such as English, in a group care setting while also learning a different language natively with their family at home. You may wonder: do the comprehension and productive language growth patterns look similar or different across languages? In Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\), the language growth patterns for American English (Fenson et al., 2000), Spanish (Jackson-Maldonado et al., 2013), Galician (Pérez-Pereira & Resches, 2007) and European Portuguese (Frota et al., 2016) are compared. The top graph shows language comprehension growth in children between the ages of 8 to 18 months and the bottom graph shows language production growth in children between the ages of 8 to 18 months. These findings indicate that overall early language development trends are similar across languages.
As language production is limited during the first year of life, examining production from 16 to 30 months reveals much more growth. Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\) presents the month-by-month vocabulary production scores for toddlers between the ages of 16 to 30 months across the same four languages.
A common finding in language development research is that a sex effect emerges—female and male infants and toddlers have different rates of growth (Bornstein et al., 2004; Eriksson et al., 2012; Simonsen et al., 2014). Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\) presents vocabulary production growth for fourteen different languages from children between the ages of 16 to 36 months of age. Across many languages there are early language differences by sex, often to the advantage of girls in the early months.
[1] Image by Frota et al., (2016). Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms. First Language, 36(5), 525-545. CC by 3.0.