Living in Two Worlds

In Bialystok’s (2001) description of the conditions under which bilingual children acquire language she states, “Monolingual and bilingual children move in different cognitive worlds, experience different linguistic environments, and are challenged to communicate using different resources remaining sensitive to different abstract dimensions” (p. 88). In this blog, we post about development of two languages. We explore what it’s like to learn two languages and the circumstances under which children may come to be bilingual. We think that this description of living in two worlds evokes the duality of knowing two languages and learning to function in the sometimes different contexts that those two languages represent.