Simultaneous bilingualism is a form of
bilingualism that takes place when a child becomes bilingual by learning two languages from birth. According to Annick De Houwer, in an article in
The Handbook of Child Language, simultaneous bilingualism takes place in “children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from before the age of two and who continue to be regularly addressed in those languages up until the final stages” of
language development. Both languages are acquired as
first languages. This is in contrast to
sequential bilingualism, in which the
second language is learned not as a
native language but a
foreign language.