How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
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Rather than anecdotes I’ll provide you an answer from linguistics :
Imagine you are in a room, and there is a big bucket of legos and two people. And each person starts handing you legos piece by piece. You take each piece and you start just building stuff. You don’t know what you’re building, you just are because you have suddenly realized you love legos.
You build and you build and then at one point you realize, “Hey! These pieces are all for the Lego Titanic set!” So now you go back, and you take the pieces you’ve been given already and you put them all in a pile and you start using the ones for the titanic set only for Titanic. Then you realize, one of those people is only handing you titanic pieces. So any time you get a piece from them, you add it to your Titanic pile.
Then you look at the remaining pieces and you go “Hey! These pieces are all for Lego Millenium Falcon!” And you realize all the pieces from the second person are for Millenium Falcon. Now, every time you get a piece from them you put it in the Millenium Falcon pile. You know all the titanic pieces look certain ways, and all the Millenium Falcon pieces look certain ways, so each time you get one it’s really easy to figure out which pile it goes in.
Like legos, languages follow *really precise* rules. You’re only allowed to put certain sounds together, you can only start with specific sounds, or end with certain sounds, certain types of words *have * to include specific sounds, etc etc. and as we learn a language, linguists theorize we have an internal “grammar” that we attach everything we learn to. Once we get enough rules, we start to figure out what fits and what doesn’t. Children who are exposed to multiple languages build multiple “grammars” and eventually they hit a point where they’ve gotten enough pieces of the language that they realize it needs its own tree. Once they’ve got that, all the new words and rules get assigned to the appropriate tree based off the information that they have.
Our ability to assign information is CRAZY GOOD. This is called **[Poverty of Stimulus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus)**, kids who are definitely not exposed to enough of a language to learn all the rules still figure them out. We are just naturally attuned to figuring out language.
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