@ ? for the multilingual families

[anna7602]

Do your LOs have pronunciation issues going across languages? We were raising DD bilingual Spanish/English from birth and then moved to France when she was just shy of 4. She does funny things in French, like pronounce v like a b, the way one does in Spanish (so "vous" sounds like "boo," for example), even though I am pretty sure she was pronouncing a regular v in English before we came here. Now she is pronouncing all r's like the French r. So, instead of rolling the r in words in Spanish, they all sound like guttural r's.

Not sure if this is all developmentally normal and will work itself out or if I should be correcting her more? I always model the words and I spend a lot of time talking to her in Spanish, but I don't necessarily "correct" her, if you know what I mean.

[bugabean]

DD has language issues (suspected autism spectrum disorder) so she may not be the best example, but her pronunciation issues are the same across both languages. Like she says p's where there should be m's, which doesn't make sense in either English or Danish. She tends to move the s's in consonant clusters (taks instead of task), even though both languages have the sk, sp, etc. sounds. I haven't noticed anything that sounds like one language affecting pronunciation in another, but then she still mixes both languages a lot. And her language really sucks. So, like I said, not the best example.

[cricketwife]

It's sounds like she is physically able to produce the different sounds but that she's experiencing some interference from one language to another. I think it'll work itself out.

[allibally]

Jun 21, 2012 15:23:46 GMT -5 cricketwife said:

It's sounds like she is physically able to produce the different sounds but that she's experiencing some interference from one language to another. I think it'll work itself out.

This is what it sounds like to me too.

[potatopie]

Just turned in my dissertation proposal on the topic of bilingual families this morning. Definitely nothing to worry about. Bilingual children generalize language rules as they learn the same way monolingual children do (like saying "hided" instead of "hid"). She'll eventually work through three languages no problem.