ABSTRACT
Children who are born into mixed language or immigrant families have an early language development which is in many ways different from that experienced by those born into monolingual majority language families. In the case of mixed language families, where both languages are used at home, the child’s main difficulty is caused by the relatively small amount of input in each language. Where monolingual English babies hear both parents saying the same words to them, as in ‘Here’s your teddy’, ‘Where’s teddy now?’, ‘What a nice teddy!’, children whose parents speak different languages to them will get only half as much input in each language. If parents do not spend equal amounts of time talking to their children, which is the way things work out in most families, there will be even less chance for the children to learn the words of one of the languages. The children are going to have a harder time separating the stream of sound into meaningful chunks of language than if they had only one language, because they will hear the same words being repeated less frequently.
