Explaining differences in language acquisition between siblings

[Leila Monaghan]

Hi Ignasi,

Very interesting.  I am no expert in language acquisition but do think this
question becomes even more interesting when multiple languages are
involved.  I  was born to an American father and English mother in the US,
moved to England at 6 months, moved to France at two, then moved back to
the US at five.  My brother was born in England and spent the first three
years of his life in France (admittedly with not that much contact with the
French), my sister was born in France and then we immediately moved to the
US, so she grew up surrounded by American English.

Linguistically, I was a late speaker but when I did speak, I did so in
complete sentences.  I am a visual learner and don't have much of a memory
for sound (there is a reason I am a sign language researcher!) which might
have had something to do with that.  Not sure the patterns of my brother
and sister but suspect they were more typical, i.e. more following the
classic steps of language acquisition than I did.  I was also the only one
of the three of us who had to deal with going to school in French so did
acquire French as well as English at an early age but promptly forgot it
when we moved to the US.  I have always thought of my brother and sister as
having much more American accents than I do.  Once had a great very
international class at UCLA where almost all my students were second
language speakers of English.  We did a survey and as predicted by the
models, linguistic forms really did differ according to age of acquisition.

cheers,

Leila

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Ignasi Clemente
<ignasiclemente at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> today I was lecturing on language acquisition, and a student asked me a
> question about her children. One of her children spent some time playing
> with sounds, and gradually, moved on through the different stages of
> language acquisition.  Her other child, repeatedly went from zero to one:
> he didn't play much with sounds, but then uttered one words without
> problems; he then played with one words, and suddenly, moved on to two
> words.  Other than general statement about cognitive maturation, and that
> children are different people with different personalities, I couldn't
> really answer her question about differences between her two children, who
> were acquiring the same language in a similar social context. Obviously,
> the second child had an older sibling than the first one did not.
>
> This is what my student told me from her experience raising her children,
> and therefore there will be a bias of recollection. Also, I'm assuming that
> she is referring to differences at comparable biological age brackets.
>
> Can I say more in terms of differences in production of language from a
> developmental perspective? I'm aware of the controversies around measuring
> acquisition in terms of biological age, but I would appreciate any comments
> or suggestions.
>
> Ignasi
>



-- 
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Anthropology
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming