SJ has definitely come to comprehend both English and Spanish. As we desperately search for a day care center for her September admittance we discussed a center in which Spanish was spoken or taught. On my Facebook feed today I read a NY Times article that highlighted questions I've had about teaching our girls to be bilingual from birth. Check out the highlights. The originial article is here.
Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.
SJ has chosen to speak primarly in English, considering she has been exposed to both English and Spanish equally, I often wonder if its because I speak English.
Check out this TED video presented by Patricia Kuhl titled, The linguistic genius of babies.
