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I read with interest the News in Brief titled "Infants and Second Language Acquisition" in the Sept. 25, 2007 issue. The brief stated that "Infants have the capacity to be multilingual, but the ability starts to disappear after about 8 months of age unless they have been exposed to different languages in their daily lives...[and] that the best way to introduce a second language is full immersion at a few months—not years—old." Unfortunately, the brief paraphrases a newspaper account of the research and is not based on the original research paper itself [Weikum et al. (2007). Visual language discrimination in infancy. Science, 316, 1159]. The research paper is silent on the application of this work to the relationship between age of exposure and subsequent language skill.
The brief may leave the impression that if a second language is not introduced within the first few months, then bilingual children will not be able to develop age-appropriate skills in both languages. Current research does not support that conclusion. For example, Paradis [Paradis, J., 2007, Second language acquisition in childhood. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development (pp. 387–405). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing] found that after 21 months of exposure to English, 40% of the bilingual children in her study performed within the (monolingual) normal range for the production of grammatical morphemes, 65% for receptive vocabulary, and 90% for story grammar. Research such as this indicates more than one path to a bilingual end.
Brian Goldstein
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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