ABSTRACT
Language is an important part of child development, and in an increasingly global world, more and more parents are drawn to the idea of giving their children the gift of bilingualism. Some parents may hire a babysitter who speaks another language, enroll their children in a language immersion program, or play some foreign language videos in the hope that an early exposure to the sounds of another language will help their children learn it later on. Much of the research on children acquiring two or more languages from birth has been conducted by linguists studying the language development of their own children. Living with the children in the same household, parents can observe children's language development unobtrusively as participant observers. While simultaneous bilingual acquisition proceeds in much the same way as monolingual acquisition in the respective languages, successive bilingual acquisition is qualitatively different from monolingual first language acquisition.
