Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

Most likely the underlying factor that can explain these differences between different sets of
parents boils down to different patterns in the overall frequency with which children hear
the minority language.
The importance of children's language learning histories
As shown above, frequency of language input is a very important factor that can help
determine whether young children speak a language or not. This implies that it will also
matter for how long a child has had input in a language. This is where children's language
learning histories come in. Some children growing up bilingually have had input in two
languages from birth. Yann and Pelle are examples of this. Other children like Alana and
Bronwyn started out like monolingual children and heard only one language for some time
after birth, and then through changed circumstances (often through daycare or preschool)
started hearing an additional language.
The situation where children have had language input in two languages from birth is termed
Bilingual First Language Acquisition or BFLA. When children start off monolingually but a
second language is added to the input some time later we speak of Early Second Language or
ESLA.
These different input situations create different expectations for bilingual development.
When five-year-old Yann, a BFLA child, speaks either of his languages, he speaks them pretty
much like a monolingual child would for each separately. When five-year-old Bronwyn, an
ESLA child, speaks either of her languages, she makes some strange mistakes in her second
language (English) that are influenced by Welsh, her first language, and that monolingual
children learning just English would never make. Yann knows about as many words in both
his languages, whereas Bronwyn knows far more words in her first language (Welsh) than in
her second. These differences between Yann and Bronwyn can be explained by the fact that
Yann had much more opportunity to learn his two languages (5 years for each) than
Bronwyn (5 years for Welsh, but only 1 year for English). Also, language structures learned
before will affect those learned later.
Another major difference between BFLA and ESLA is that once children are of a talking age
(for most children, definitely by the time they are 1.5 years old), BFLA children will not just
remain silent. They may speak just a single language regardless of whether they are
addressed in the minority or majority language, but they will speak. ESLA children, on the
other hand, will typically be silent for several months when they start to be addressed in the
majority language (at home they will speak the minority language fluently). This initial "silent
period" is a well-known phenomenon in ESLA. It does not point to any language learning
problem. Rather, it is part of the normal second language learning process in children under
age 6. It was just part of this normal second language learning process when Alana was silent
in the first half year that she spent at her Finnish-language school. Unfortunately, the
teacher was not aware of the fact that this is normal.
It should be noted that both within BFLA and within ESLA there is considerable variation
between children. Some children just develop faster than others, regardless of how many
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