bilingual children

[Annick.DeHouwer]

I've been very interested in the current discussion on bilingual children.
I am a childhood bilingual myself, wrote a PhD on early bilingualism,
published a book and many other scholarly writings on it, and am the mother
of a bilingual child.
>>From both my professional and personal experience so far, I feel I can be
quite confident in stating that given a fairly balanced input condition
across two languages that a child is exposed to FROM BIRTH (meaning:
virtually similar amount of input in each language that has been steadily
present without major interruptions), any "normally developing" child (so
without any known neurological, auditive, cognitive, social-adaptive
problems) will learn to speak those languages without ANY delays as
compared to children acquiring these languages as their only language. It
must be emphasized, though, that the variability as far as the timing of
various acquisitional stages in BOTH monolingual and bilingual children is
huge, and that the range of inter-individual differences can be enormous
without there being any  question of 'delay' or 'abnormal' development.
Unfortunately, the myth of delayed development in bilingual children
continues to reign, even amongst linguists. I could say many more things
here, and I hope it is not politically incorrect for me to refer to a
chapter I wrote that tries to summarize the current state of scientific
'knowledge' about early bilingual acquisition (see the reference below).
As far as educational practices go in a bilingual family situation, there
are a number of books available that give useful hints:

Arnberg, Lenore, 1987. Raising children bilingually: the pre-school years.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Harding, Edith and Philip Reilly, 1987. The bilingual family. A handbook
for parents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saunders, George, 1988. Bilingual children: from birth to teens. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.

overview chapter:
De Houwer, Annick, 1995. 'Bilingual language acquisition'. In: Fletcher,
Paul and Brian MacWhinney, eds., 1995. The handbook of child language.
Oxford: Blackwell. 219-250.

>
>---Annick De Houwer