Petit Sounds
We created Petit Sounds, a podcast about multilingual parenting, for bi-cultural, bilingual, and multilingual families, so they can understand the process of first and second language acquisition and foster multilingualism at home.
Recent Episodes
July 20, 2022
Chapter Nine: Trilingualism at home
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…
April 8, 2022
Chapter Eight: Music and Language
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…
March 1, 2022
Chapter Seven: How to help bilingual and multilingual children in their language journey
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…
Feb. 1, 2022
Chapter Six: How babies and children learn words
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…
Jan. 1, 2022
Chapter Five: The good, the bad and the false of bilingualism
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…
Dec. 1, 2021
Chapter Four: On syntax and how children put words together
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: …