“My baby is 18 months and my husband speaks Spanish with her and I speak English. However, when I asked her, “Honey, what do you want?” she said: “tita,” which means her bottle. I knew that she understood me because we use the word tita for both languages. She understands Spanish, but she doesn`t say many words in English, just a few. I want to know if that`s normal? She can`t have a normal conversation but she says more words in Spanish than in English but I know that she understands everything that I say to her.
Thank you,
Persis”
Dear Persis,
What you describe is very typical in bilingual development. Research shows that children’s output is driven by their input. Typically, if they hear one language more, they will use that language more. We also know that children learn to understand before they speak, for the most part. It is a good sign that she appears to understand everything you say to her.
I haven’t met any 18-month-olds who can have “normal conversations” by my definition. It is common that they have a set of words in one language and another set of words in their other language with a little bit of overlap. In fact, research shows that children her age who are raised in bilingual settings typically express 70% of their concepts in one language or the other and only 30% in both languages.
I encourage you to continue to use both languages with your daughter. Before you know it, she will converse with you and your husband in English and Spanish.
Best,
Ellen Kester, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Ellen Stubbe Kester, Ph.D, CCS-LLP – A bilingual (English/Spanish) speech language professional who earned her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from The University of Texas at Austin. She has provided bilingual Spanish/English speech-language services in schools, hospitals, and early intervention settings. Her research focus is on the acquisition of semantic language skills in bilingual children, with emphasis on assessment practices for the bilingual population. She is the President of
Persis, we also are doing one parent for each language, and I can tell you that even despite all my reading and research, I was beginning to have doubts about my son really being able to use both languages well. It seemed like he got sort of stuck in a certain way, for a long time. Although his total vocabulary was always increasing, he seemed to make no movement AT ALL in being able to speak all in Spanish to a Spanish-speaker or all in English to an English-speaker. In fact, when he was younger and his “sentences” only consisted of two words it was not such a problem, but as his sentences got longer, since I’m the only one who knows both languages pretty well therefore I was the only person who could understand him. It’s often true with babies that Mommy is the only one who understands but in our case this stage just lasted a really, really long time. I may add that he truly seemed to understand very well, whether someone talked to him in one language, or the other. It was just him speaking. He didn’t seem to find it too frustrating, but everyone else sure did! Then suddenly, one day he came running up to his aunt and me, to show us a bug he had caught in his hand, and saying “Mira Tia! Look Mommy!’ Within literally a couple of weeks after that day, everything just fell into place. It was like a switch had been flipped. Now, when he meets a kid at the playground I see him go up and talk to them in one language, and if they don’t answer he immediately tries saying the same thing in his other language. So not only can he respond to the language a person speaks to him, but he recognizes these are two separate language systems, in a general sense. Even though I kind of knew it would be like this eventually, it still seems totally amazing! However, it is true, it really happens!
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