submitted on Thu, 10/04/2007 - 23:03 in Bilingual kids English/Italian Group by Serginho 
HOW DOES LANGUAGE DEVELOP:
1. The child builds a list of words from the two (or more) languages.
2. Sentences emerge containing words from both languages. The amount of mixing then rapidly declines. Maybe from 30% to 5% by the third year.
3. As the vocabulary grows, translation equivalent develops. But the acquisition for grammar of separate sets of rules takes longer. For a while, a single system of rules seems to be used for both languages, until finally the two grammars diverge. By the fourth year they are aware that the two languages are not the same. By the time these children start school, the vast majority has reached the same stage of linguistic development.
Often, young bilingual children find themselves in a linguistic twilight zone, knowing some vocabulary and structures from one language, some in another, and some in both. Such children may have a larger total vocabulary than their monolingual peers, if we include the words they know in both languages together, yet have a smaller vocabulary in each language. It is not uncommon for a bilingual 5-year- old, for example, to identify the colors as "rojo," "blanco," "yellow," "azul," and "gray."
With MO Dee Dee Do DAH we lift them out of this twilight zone and into a word where communication becomes easier no matter with whom they are speaking
More than 150 research studies conducted during the past 35 years strongly support what Goethe, the German philosopher, once said: The person who knows only one language does not truly know that language. The research suggests that bilingual children may also develop more flexibility in their thinking as a result of processing information through two different languages
