Héctor and Elaine became parents just a few months after COVID lockdowns were introduced, which brought about some challenges in their one-parent one-language plans.

As remote working brought English into more non-native speakers’ homes, Elaine and Héctor were well-equipped tor trilingual child-raising. But their guest for this episode, Ilaria Zambotti, has taken a different approach.

• Trilingualism in Family, School and Community

Around 90% of the world’s languages are tonal, meaning that unlike English, Spanish, or German, tone patterns are used to distinguish words and inflections. Speakers of tonal languages like Mandarin are more likely to develop perfect pitch, meaning they can tell what note is being played, without needing to hear another for reference.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore music, tone, and its relationship to language learning.

• Learning the "Special Note": Evidence for a Critical Period for Absolute Pitch Acquisition
• Critical period hypothesis
• Scotch Snaps in Hip Hop, by Adam Neely
• Music, Language, and the Brain, by Aniruddh D Patel
• A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff
• The Potential Role of Music in Second Language Learning, by Ieva Zeromskaite

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore some of the questions you might want to consider when raising a child in a bilingual household:

Do you speak your partner’s language?

If not, are you willing to learn?

Do you live near other native speakers of your heritage language?

If you do, you can organise playdates to help with the language learning process. And if you aren’t so lucky, technology can help bridge the gap. A call with a relative can give them more exposure.

Elaine and Héctor also discuss the different opportunities for language learning that present themselves all the way through your child’s young life.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore nouns, how babies learn to identify them before being able to pronounce them, then eventually form the words themselves.

They examine the categories of words babies are able to understand at key development stages, and how those categories start off fuzzy – with “mama” meaning simply “woman” – and become clearer over time.

Also, Héctor shares his approach to helping children with their phonemic awareness.

• Child Language: Acquisition and Development, by Matthew Saxton
• Priming overgeneralizations in two- and four-year-old children

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore the myths, advantages, and potential disadvantages around being bilingual or multilingual. They are joined by applied linguist Friederike Sell, an expert in language learning and multilingualism.

As a non-native English speaker, Héctor is able to use his native Spanish language skills to decode some of the morphemes within English speech, and find meaning behind words that native English speakers might not know.

• The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language
• How Language Shapes the Way We Think, a TED talk by Lera Borodotsky
• Benjamin Whorf
• The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, by John McWhorter
• Change of Language, Change of Personality? by Francois Grosjean

It might not take long for your baby to go from speaking their first words to combining them, but the way they do so is more exploratory than you might think. In this fourth episode, Elaine and Héctor take a look at syntax: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

Humans aren't unique in identifying speech sounds. We all know that parrots can replicate speech, but dogs have been known to identify objects by name, cats can recognise their owner's voice, and even African elephants have been able to identify the sounds of speech.

• A dynamic systems approach to babbling and words
• Elephants can determine ethnicity, gender, and age from acoustic cues in human voices

In their previous episode, Elaine and Hector discussed language during pregnancy. Now they look at how babies understand and begin to form syllables into words, and gradually into sentences.

But what is a word? How do we know where a word starts or finishes? How do we learn to conjugate a verb? And how do bilingual and multilingual children develop their respective vocabularies?

• Willard Van Orman Quine
• Jean Berko Gleason
• Matthew Saxton

Elaine and Hector take questions from the listeners about second-language adoption and raising a child in a language that is not your mother tongue. They uncover the surprising sounds your baby can hear from their earliest days, and explore the differences between English, Spanish and German speech sounds, other vocal sounds across languages, and the problem that co-articulation (how words run together) presents to smart speakers and other devices with speech recognition.

Links

• Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition
• "The-Cat-In-The-Hat" studies and other work by Tony deCasper