Evaluating Attributions of Delay and Confusion in Young Bilinguals: Special Insights from Infants Acquiring a Signed and a Spoken Language

The question of whether early simultaneous exposure to two languages causes delayed language acquisition & language confusion is answered emphatically in the negative, based on findings of recently published studies by Holowka, Petitto, & others in which the simultaneous acquisition of a spoken & a signed language were investigated. Early stages in the acquisition of two spoken languages are characterized by a large proportion of words, termed neutrals, that can be assigned to neither language & have been taken as evidence of language confusion in bilingual infants; signed-spoken language bilinguals, however, evidence no neutrals at all & clearly know from the onset of language acquisition that they are acquiring two distinct languages. This finding of different but parallel acquisition of two languages is generalized to spoken-language bilinguals by suggesting that the phenomenon of neutrals is due to a phonological competition effect at the surface. 56 References. J. Hitchcock