The Speech of Fluent Child Bilinguals

ANNICK DE HOUWER

Summary

This chapter discusses preliterate bilingual children's language development and issues of fluency. In doing so, it distinguishes between children with bilingual input from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition; BFLA) and children who added a second language to a first (Early Second Language Acquisition; ESLA). While many patterns of language development are similar for both these kinds of bilingual children, others are quite different. It is emphasized that an assessment of young bilingual children's language behavior needs to take into account the length of time of exposure to each language and children's levels of production proficiency in each language. These can vary greatly amongst bilingual children and are crucial in helping to determine whether any disfluencies are likely to be developmental in nature or not.

It is established that so far, there is no evidence for the claim that early bilingualism may be a cause of abnormal disfluencies. Rather than disfluent, the speech of young bilinguals is generally quite fluent. Disfluencies that do appear in bilingual children show the same patterns as have been identified in young monolinguals.

1 Introduction

In 1937, the influential French psychoanalyst and linguist Edouard Pichon published a book on stuttering with a speech therapist (Pichon & Borel-Maisonny, 1937) in which they claimed that early child bilingualism was a risk factor for stuttering. Pichon and Borel-Maisonny proposed that having to choose a word from the proper language amongst two alternatives each from a different language slowed down the speech production process and made it much more laborious and difficult, resulting in a higher chance of stuttering. In the same year, Travis, Johnson and Shover claimed to have shown a correlation between bilingualism and stuttering in nearly 5000 school children ranging from 4 to 17 years of age. Lebrun and Paradis (1984) criticized this work for failing to point out that one group of monolinguals in the Travis et al. (1937) study (the so-called 'Black monolinguals') presented proportionally more stutterers than the 'White or Oriental bilinguals' or 'White or Oriental multilinguals'. Lebrun and Paradis (1984) thus suggested that instead of bilingualism, a racial factor might be relevant. Recent empirical evidence, however, shows that there is no basis for assuming that there is anything like racially determined stuttering (Proctor et al., 2008). Lebrun and Paradis' (1984) point, though, that early bilingualism is not a causal factor for stuttering has recently been supported by Howell et al. (2009). Howell et al. showed that the proportion of diagnosed child bilingual stutterers in a sample of 317 children who stuttered in the greater London area (69 out of 317, or 21.8%) was in fact smaller than the proportion of child bilingual speakers in London schools (28.4%). This again calls into question the idea that bilingual children stand a higher chance of stuttering than monolingual ones.

The notion that early bilingualism might be a risk factor for stuttering, though, continues to be a concern to many parents and educators and, indeed, scholars: Karniol (1992) has gone as far as to suggest that early bilingualism should be avoided. She based this opinion on another view, viz. that acquiring two languages in early childhood increases cognitive load, and by implication increases the chance of stuttering. This is in line with Pichon and Borel-Maisonny's (1937) earlier claim that having to choose the proper word among two alternatives slows down the language production process.

The 'bad press' for early child bilingualism continues to exist. Yet, if a bilingual language learning situation really were to slow down the language production process, child bilinguals should be slower to develop speech than monolinguals. In fact, they are not. In spite of having to learn two languages rather than just one, bilingual children reach specific developmental milestones within the same age ranges as children who hear just one language (for overviews, see De Houwer, 2002, 2005, 2009, and below). In addition, reports of bilingual children's speech usually show them to be generally quite fluent in their speech production (I return to this point below; see also Mennen, this volume). Transcripts of actual bilingual child speech (see, e.g. the bilingual transcripts available through CHILDES (e.g. MacWhinney, 1991) as summarized in De Houwer, 2009) fail to show any general evidence of difficulties with speech production.

Until quite recently, however, there was no direct evidence that could either refute or substantiate the claim that in comparison to early child monolingualism, early child bilingualism increases cognitive load and thereby slows down learning. Recent research has shown that if there is an issue of slower learning, it is the monolingual children who are learning at a slower pace, and it is the bilingual children who have a cognitive advantage. Compared to age-matched bilingual infants, monolinguals have a much smaller comprehension lexicon (De Houwer et al., 2006, in preparation), are much less able to suppress a previously learned response when needed (Kovacs & Mehler, 2009a), exhibit less inhibitory control (Ibanez et al., 2009), cannot learn multiple structural...