They might develop speech slower because they have at least twice as much to process, that’s pretty much it 🙄
I’m not bitter about having missed the chance to be multilingual fluent thanks to severely outdated information, not in the slightest
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From my limited observation - Smallsteps and a few friends with bi/multilingual kids, they learn faster. I do think parental attention plays a large role here, as the children need to be actively exposed to language and it requires effort by the parents. Not every parent is interested, but will raise bilingual out of necessity.
For example, we couldn't raise Smallsteps with Finnish only because of me - but if I didn't pay attention to the way we speak English together, it could be that she would not have the range she needs to build upon, or it would mix in with her Finnish. She hasn't mixed the languages (unless she doesn't know a specific word) pretty much at all, but we made a very clear distinction between what Mummy says and Daddy says. Some parents think children will just know this and they will of course learn it in time, but it might be after those foundational years.
Think when I was little (not sure, would have to double check, but do remember hearing about this from someone), there were observations that kids from multilingual backgrounds talked later on average than kids from monolingual backgrounds (I don't think any other learning areas were affected, just literally they took longer to start talking) so the educated professional opinion was that too many languages caused an unacceptable delay in speech development and the advice was to pick one language and run with it and do other languages "later".
So my parents only spoke English to us (and Malay to each other when they didn't want us to know what was going on), and basically we never got around to learning the other languages until recently. Familiarity with the sounds from growing up and knowing a number of words makes it easier but it would have been infinitely easier if we'd just learned from birth XD
Distinctions as in pronunciation?