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kingwilly

Let also put it into perspective. It is one study. Much, much much more study will need to be done to determine anything. Sheesh, the group was based on

"The research was conducted among 317 London children who were referred to a speech therapist when they were aged between eight and 10. One in five of the stutterers were bilingual, speaking English at school and a second language at home."

1 in 5 stutters were Bilingual!? The title could have read "Early monolingualism is FOUR times more likely to produce stutters than bilinugual children!"

Was this one speech therapist? Where were they based? (for instance if it was Birmingham, shouldnt the title read 1 in 5 muslims become stutters?)

Was there a control group?

Paper selling headline. nothing more.

kingwilly

have you ?

jandajoy

You're not far out there KW.

Till we can see the original resource we're none the wiser.

pai nai ma

biracial. thank you

jandajoy

I freely admit to not reading the original. I've stressed the use of the conditional tense.

I'm not suggesting that it's gospel but, I do think it's interesting for people, particularly parents, living in multilingual societies.

Surely you don't condemn everything carte blanche, because it's in a newspaper.

An exchange of views, opinions and experiences can be helpful.

Don't you agree?

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panama hat

Could, but not would. My brother's kids are all bi-lingual and not mixed. Not all the same second language, however.

jandajoy

When were you last in Birmingham KW?
There are lots of other minority groups there.

kingwilly

not all that relevant to the point I was making.

Actually that was supposed to be a funny reference to Emporer Tud's assertions that Birmingham is being overrun by muslims. Does not change the substance of what I was saying.

The headline could have said fat children are more likely to stutter.

jandajoy

Yes, I thought it might have been and was going to comment but I'm too scared of his wrath..........

I wonder if fat kids do?
Ugly kids?

Hmmm interesting.

SwiftNeddyJ

I studied linguistics at Uni many moons ago. The idea at the time was that it didn't matter how many languages (well, maybe 30 might be a *bit* much!) a child was exposed to as they developed -- they will pick out the correct phonemes and sounds relevant to each language and learn to apply them correctly.

This all takes place automagically up to about the 5 or 6 year old stage when the "critcial period" ends and it becomes hard to learn languages, or effectively, learn them with the same difficulty we adults generally have.

As far as stuttering is concerned -- in my experience, it was never anything to do with language acquisition or second/third/N language learning. If anything it's down to either 1) mental/physical disorder or 2) psychological, which I suspect is probably the issue here. And by psychological I don't mean anything scarey or insulting but general things like feeling rushed, too many thoughts to articulate quick enough, nervousness, etc. Same things we get as adults but for a child, magnified many more times.

Many kids when they are growing up and learning more than one language natively, will often have times when sounds/words/grammatical structures swap and glide -- it's nothing to worry about as they sort themselves out.

Pretty amazing things, the human brain.

jandajoy

Exactly.

entering the "cognitive"

Interesting points and all part of the mystery. Good contribution.

kingwilly

or indeed, I wonder how many of the 317 were gay?

"Study shows that gay children may be at risk of stuttering!"

"Research shows that stuttering children may be more likely to become Gay"

the list could go on.

jandajoy

You might be right there.
You might be right there.
You might be right there.

wandering

Nope.
Basing my statement on the small article that got this ball rolling.

jandajoy

Me too, mate. Me too.

kingwilly

gotta green ya for that one.

wandering

My daughter is Aussie/American and understands English & Thai so obviously I agree. I was trying to emphasize the prejudiced goals of the article.

nidhogg

Not really, I think. The critical point which is missing from the information we have at the moment is "what is the proportion of bilingualism in the local population from which this cohort is drawn"?

So, we need the other half of the equation. Take an age matched group (kids aged between 8 and 10) at random and look at the rate of bilingualism. If, say, only 1% of the matched cohort is bilingual, then the authors are right - stuttering is more likely in bilingual kids (they are significantly over represented amongst stutterers). If however the local community is very mixed, and there are 20% bilingual kids in the normal population, then the study is wrong.

My guess (FWIW) is that the critical point missing is that bilingualism is not present at a rate of 20% in the local school going population, and hence bilingual kids are more likely to stuter than non-bilingual kids.

kingwilly

I'm not so certain about that, we are talking about migrant filled England here. this could well be a population of 45% bilingual children....

nidhogg

Indeed. As I said, thats the critical factor.