Bilingualism and your baby

Notice how I mentioned only a baby and didn't bother to say bilingualism and your toddler or bilingualism and your kindergartener.  That's because the prime time to get your little one to learn a language is RIGHT NOW (that is, if you have a baby who is of the under 12 months variety).  This means that little Miss Mama-To-Be has to start brushing up on her high school/college Spanish, take that Japanese class at the Community College, or start making the rounds with the Rosetta Stone package.  Or, if you have a baby and the extent of your bilingualism lies in knowing that "unagi" means eel in Japanese (you love sushi) or that "camarones" means shrimp in Spanish (because you love shrimp burritos), then it's best that you get yourself a nanny/tutor/family member whose prima lingua is the language you want your little peanut to learn and who will have the time to speak to them often.  Seriously.

This won't work as well as having a real-live person speaking to your child often in Spanish. 

Here's an excerpt from published authors over at the Journal of Phonetics:

Our results suggest that bilingual infants’ brain responses to speech differ from the pattern shown by monolingual infants. Bilingual infants did not show neural discrimination of either the Spanish or English contrast at 6–9 months. By 10–12 months of age, neural discrimination was observed for both contrasts. Bilingual infants showed continuous improvement in neural discrimination of the phonetic units from both languages with increasing age. Group differences in bilingual infants’ speech discrimination abilities are related to the amount of exposure to each of their native languages in the home. Finally, we show that infants’ later word production measures are significantly related to both their early neural discrimination skills and the amount exposure to the two languages early in development.

 But don't get upset if you haven't been on top of your bilingual game and have been raising a monolingual child so far.  Overall, the younger children are when they learn a language, the better they are able to retain the language.  (Think about dogs.  What language are they born hearing (most of them)? Dog, right?  But by constantly talking and conditioning your dog in English, it will start to "understand" basic commands in English.  Or French or Spanish.  Although I must say I'm doubly impressed when a dog knows words in languages that I don't.)  Plus, you get the added bonus of having other people remark ("Oooohh...that little girl/boy is so smart!  S/he knows how to speak English AND (other language)!") about your child's language abilities.  I know I do.  And the feeling I have of innate intelligence superiority over children diminishes when I meet a child who is able to speak fluently in Russian and in English. 

Read a great article about this study over at the Freakonomics Blog.