jay32's comments

Child Speech and Language Development - Blog Entry

05 Jul 2009 09:25 PM

I have a young baby adopted from China - I also have a Chinese au pair. The au pair's English is pretty good, but she has a rather heavy accent. We were concerned that our child would start to pick up this accent from the au pair, since we work fulltime and the baby is with the au pair 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. We read a fascinating blog on www.aupairclearinghouse.com that explained that Asians have more difficulty pronouncing certain sounds and babies/toddlers will pick up these sounds/accents. I don't know if our child will continue to sound out her words like the au pair (example, the au pair says "ting" for "thing"), but the website gave us pause. We probably will not choose another au pair from an Asian country because of this. There is a lot of information on au pairs and the ins and outs of hosting an au pair on this site - we actually read this website before we signed up with an agency. It is a very good place to start: www.aupairclearinghouse.com. Search for Asians and speech and the comment/blog will come up.