Also: does it hinder their progress at each language?
In: Biology
When you’re little, you’re the smartest you’ll ever be in your life at any given time. Your brain is a sponge that absorbs all of the basic building blocks needed to learn a language.
All language is is a series of repeated patterns.
The more languages you’re exposed to when young, the higher the chances are of learning those different linguistic structural patterns and retaining them.
As you get older, your ability to retain that information lessens bc you’ve likely become dominant in obtaining one specific language pattern. If you grew up bilingual, your brain has become accustomed to sorting out the proper pattern for two languages. So in English you learn the pattern “I went to the store” and the Spanish pattern would be “The store is where I went.”
Language takes practice, which is why a toddler will often babble and make up words all the while seemingly doing so in a structured order.
My toddler can now say “Es. Peas tange me. Imma poo poo.” She’s saying “Yes. Please change me. I went poo poo.” She’s heard a variety of those words over and over and has learned the language pattern, so even though it’s not fully developed, she understands the meaning of that pattern and the order it goes in.
It’s similar to learning to count 1-10 and then counting down from 10 to 1. Both are correct ways to count, but are different patterns using the same information. This is why you’re able to translate “Adios” to “Goodbye”. They’re the same basic linguistic principle and the same information, but different patterns.
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