Exposure to two languages carries far-reaching benefits
A new study provides evidence that bilingual speakers find it easier to learn a new language than those who only know one language. The study compared the ability of three groups of native English speakers – English-Mandarin bilinguals, English-Spanish bilinguals and monolinguals – to master words in an invented language that bore no relationship to English, Spanish or Mandarin. The bilingual participants mastered nearly twice the number of words as the monolinguals. The finding adds more support to the value of introducing another language to children at a young age.
Bilingual babies get a head start on executive functioning
A number of studies have pointed to benefits of being bilingual, but many people still believe that the experience of two languages in infancy may cause confusion and impair their acquisition of language. Now a new study shows that bilingual babies quickly adapt to different learning cues at seven months old compared with babies from single-language households. The study involved families in the Trieste area of Italy, where parents spoke to infants from birth using both Italian and Slovenian mother tongues. When bilingual and monolingual babies were first taught to look at one side of a screen in response to a sound cue (and in anticipation of a visual “reward” image of a puppet), then required to switch sides, it was found that bilingual babies quickly learned to look at the other side, but the monolingual babies never adapted to the change. The findings indicate that bilingualism gives an advantage above the purely linguistic, in executive function, which is consistent with other research indicating bilingual children have improved attention.
Beneficial effects of bilingual learning
A recent Canadian study comparing young monolingual children to bilingual found that bilingual children were much better at a non-language cognitive task. The 4-6 year old bilingual children were versed in a spoken language and a signing one. It was suggested that their higher cognitive skill was due to the increased computational demands of processing two different language systems.