Episodes
Chapter Nine: Trilingualism at home
July 20, 2022
Héctor and Elaine became parents just a few months before 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 sp…
Chapter Eight: Music and Language
April 8, 2022
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 develo…
Chapter Seven: How to help bilingual and multilingual children in their language journey
March 1, 2022
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 n…
Chapter Six: How babies and children learn words
Feb. 1, 2022
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 unde…
Chapter Five: The good, the bad and the false of bilingualism
Jan. 1, 2022
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 m…
Chapter Four: On syntax and how children put words together
Dec. 1, 2021
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: …
Chapter Three: Language milestones and first words
Nov. 1, 2021
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 kno…
Chapter Two: Language during pregnancy
Oct. 1, 2021
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 d…
Chapter One: The Language Café
Sept. 1, 2021
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 …
Introducing Petit Sounds, the multilingual parenting podcast
July 7, 2021
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 …