Bilingual baby update

Earlier this week I was hanging out with a friend of mine, her husband and their quite-not-one-year old. They're quite the international family: Mom is a Puerto Rican/American/Jew immigration lawyer, Dad is English, and Baby is a little Puerto Rican JewBrit. Anyway the kid's official first word is "Azha!" which is his way of saying "alla," meaning "over there" in Spanish. He points toward where he wants to go when he says it, too. I teased my friend for managing to give the baby the crazy island accent :-P

Bilingual babies

Bilingualism and language acquisition has always been a fascination of mine, primarily because I was a bilingual baby myself. According to my parents (who would know) I spoke in a mix of French and English until age 2 or so, after which I realized that those were actually two separate languages. Since then I have maintained an equal level of fluency in each language (though there are quite a few topics that I can only discuss intelligently in one language). My brother, on the other hand is much stronger in French than in English, which no one in family has a good explanation for.
This intriguing article on Science Daily explains that children reared in bilingual homes learn language differently from monolingual babies. I'd heard that before, and in particular that bilingual children retained a much better ability to learn new languages in adulthood than do children raised with only one language. I've certainly experienced that to be the case. Which is why is baffles and saddens me when immigrant parents don't teach their native language to their kids, or when anyone claims that bilingual education is bad for children.