How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
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In the United States, many multilingual households use based on pretty specific social settings. For example, I had a co-worker from Germany, and their kids only spoke German to their parents, because there aren’t a lot of German speakers in our area.
One day when we were all out at an arts festival, they ran into an older German couple who, when they learned that the boys had learned German, were very excited to speak with them. The old man spoke a sentence in German, and I thought the boys’ heads were going to explode. The younger one paused, and then started crying loudly.
As far as they knew, only their parents spoke German. They were absolutely shocked to learn that someone else knew this language that, so far as they knew, was some kind of secret communication they had only with their parents.
It was both adorable, and a little bit sad to see them lose this part of their childhood innocence.
So to answer your question more directly, every child is different. The human brain is incredibly adept at recognizing patterns and formulating contextual frameworks. We don’t have to think about forming these connections; they are inherent to the way our brains work.
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