Petit Sounds

Héctor and Elaine became parents just a few months after COVID lockdowns were introduced, which brought about some challenges in their one-parent one-language plans.

As remote working brought English into more non-native speakers’ homes, Elaine and Héctor were well-equipped tor trilingual child-raising. But their guest for this episode, Ilaria Zambotti, has taken a different approach.

Around 90% of the world’s languages are tonal, meaning that unlike English, Spanish, or German, tone patterns are used to distinguish words and inflections. Speakers of tonal languages like Mandarin are more likely to develop perfect pitch, meaning they can tell what note is being played, without needing to hear another for reference.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore music, tone, and its relationship to language learning.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore some of the questions you might want to consider when raising a child in a bilingual household:

Do you speak your partner’s language?

If not, are you willing to learn?

Do you live near other native speakers of your heritage language?

If you do, you can organise playdates to help with the language learning process. And if you aren’t so lucky, technology can help bridge the gap. A call with a relative can give them more exposure.

Elaine and Héctor also discuss the different opportunities for language learning that present themselves all the way through your child’s young life.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore nouns, how babies learn to identify them before being able to pronounce them, then eventually form the words themselves.

They examine the categories of words babies are able to understand at key development stages, and how those categories start off fuzzy – with “mama” meaning simply “woman” – and become clearer over time.

Also, Héctor shares his approach to helping children with their phonemic awareness.

In this episode, Héctor and Elaine explore the myths, advantages, and potential disadvantages around being bilingual or multilingual. They are joined by applied linguist Friederike Sell, an expert in language learning and multilingualism.

As a non-native English speaker, Héctor is able to use his native Spanish language skills to decode some of the morphemes within English speech, and find meaning behind words that native English speakers might not know.

It might not take long for your baby to go from speaking their first words to combining them, but the way they do so is more exploratory than you might think. In this fourth episode, Elaine and Héctor take a look at syntax: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

Humans aren't unique in identifying speech sounds. We all know that parrots can replicate speech, but dogs have been known to identify objects by name, cats can recognise their owner's voice, and even African elephants have been able to identify the sounds of speech.

In their previous episode, Elaine and Hector discussed language during pregnancy. Now they look at how babies understand and begin to form syllables into words, and gradually into sentences.

But what is a word? How do we know where a word starts or finishes? How do we learn to conjugate a verb? And how do bilingual and multilingual children develop their respective vocabularies?

Elaine and Hector take questions from the listeners about second-language adoption and raising a child in a language that is not your mother tongue. They uncover the surprising sounds your baby can hear from their earliest days, and explore the differences between English, Spanish and German speech sounds, other vocal sounds across languages, and the problem that co-articulation (how words run together) presents to smart speakers and other devices with speech recognition.

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Meet Elaine. She was born in the Dominican Republic, speaks German, but wanted to practise Spanish. On a trip to Mexico in 2015, her brother recommended a language café where people meet to exchange languages. There she ran into Hector, a language teacher from Mexico who spoke Spanish but wanted to practise German.

The rest was up to fate, although it didn't give them an easy ride.

In this first chapter of Petit Sounds, you'll learn how these two language lovers went from a chance encounter to raising a child in a bilingual household.

Hallo, Hola, Hello! Welcome to Petit Sounds, a podcast about multilingual parenting, with your hosts Elaine and Héctor.

We created this podcast specially for you who, like us, is in a couple with someone that speaks another language and who wants to create the best environment for your kid to learn languages, or you want to understand better how babies can learn one, two or many languages.

Tag along and get ready for all the stories about how a half-German, half-Dominican biology teacher met and married a Mexican language teacher, how that Mexican came to learn German, how we’ve been raising our kid bilingually in German and Spanish, and how lockdowns forced English into our house. All together with a twist of biology and linguistics. Sweet, sweet linguistics.

So if you want to learn more about how language grows inside your baby and how you can foster multilingualism at home, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast fix from. You can also follow @petitsounds on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also get more information about us on our website.