Raising a Bilingual Child Quotes

“If children start early in a monolingual preschool, they get the idea early—when their minority language is still not well established—that English is all that matters, so I do not recommend an English preschool at a time when you could be solidifying the child’s command of the minority language.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child

“In the early 1990s, Moon and colleagues showed that two-day-olds can distinguish the sounds of their language from those of an unfamiliar language if the overall rhythms of the sentences are different between languages. Their tiny subjects could tell English from French and Japanese because they have different rhythmic structures, but not English from Dutch, because the rhythmic structures are very similar. By five months, English-learning babies could distinguish English from Dutch, too. At that same age, bilingual Catalan-and Spanish-learning infants could distinguish both of their languages from other languages and from each other.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child

“Trick 5: Use monolingual mode in your own speech.
I can’t emphasize enough the need to monitor your own behavior. Children are sensitive to subtle differences in adults’ rate of switching between languages, and then they match their own rate with that of the adult. If you are constantly switching out of the minority language, it will not be a surprise that the child does, too.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child

“Another area of thinking where bilinguals have been shown to excel is divergent thinking, the ability to come up with many different solutions rather than just one. Divergent thinking is considered to be one of the basic elements of creativity.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child

“how bilingualism has been shown to benefit • bilingual children’s precocious knowledge of language, • their enhanced cognitive development in general, and • the social and cultural growth they experience.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child

“Many people, especially in countries like the U.S. with a monolingual mainstream culture, think that being monolingual is the most natural way to grow up. In fact, far from being the norm, monolingualism is the exception. There are very few, if any, places in the world where a society can exist in complete isolation from contact and interaction with people of other cultures.”
― Barbara Zurer Pearson, Raising a Bilingual Child