Cognitive advantages to bilingualism

Historically, bilingualism was thought to be detrimental to a child's cognitive and linguistic abilities. However, more recent evidence suggests that bilingualism can actually bestow a set of cognitive benefits, and it may enhance literacy.

Old misconceptions

Early research suggested that learning two languages in childhood was detrimental to a child's cognitive abilities.^[1] This was due to the idea that the two languages were learned independently and the knowledge of learning one did not transfer into the other. It was thought that as more was learned in one language, less could be learned in the other. This gives the idea of there being a total amount of language acquisition, and so the pieces learned in each language together have to add up to this total. For this reason parents and teachers tried to force children to only learn one language instead of cultivating the ability to learn both.

The consensus among linguists, as well as the general public today, however, is leaning towards the opposite; the idea that knowledge in the two languages would be kept separate instead of influencing each other is rejected as irrational by many. For example, a child who has learned the concept of adding and subtracting in one language would not need to re-learn the concept in another language. By that same token, a child who has learned to recognize that spoken language can be broken up into words, which can be represented in writing in one language is not going to need to be re-taught the idea of writing representing spoken language.

Enhancing effects in children

When a child is fluent in two languages, they know more than one word for the same object or concept. Current research leads to the belief that this can add to the cognitive flexibility of the child. The different connotations and ideas around a word has in the different languages the child knows allows the child to build a more complex understanding of the word at a younger age.

In their book In Other Words^[2], Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta examine the idea that "the knowledge of two languages is greater than the sum of its parts." They argue that the benefits from being bilingual go much further than simply knowing two languages. Because the structures and ideas of the two languages are so different it forces the child to think in more complicated ways than if they were learning only one language. Among the benefits of language acquisition is the increase of metalinguistic awareness, that is, a greater sensitivity to language in general and a greater awareness of meaning and structure in language.^[3] One reason this is speculated to be true is that multilingual children receive more linguistic input, requiring a greater amount of language analysis on the part of the child.

On the other hand, Cummins suggested that if L1 (first language learned) has not reached a certain threshold of competence, the child may develop "semi-lingualism" or "limited bilingualism", a situation of lower linguistic competence in the various languages acquired, in comparison to monolingual children.^[4] Thus, while bilingualism has generally been considered to be of cognitive benefit, some studies suggest that it may have negative effects on cognitive and academic progress. According to Cummins, it is possible to explain "the negative results of these studies as being associated with linguistic minorities, where the minority language was being replaced in some sense by the socially dominant one, while the studies that found a positive effect were associated with 'additive bilingualism,' a situation in which majority-language children acquire a second language."^[5] The controversy concerning the impact of multilingualism on children is ongoing, with many researchers criticizing the very notion of "semi-lingualism".^[6] The lower linguistic skills of some children can in many cases be attributed, not to the simultaneous acquisition of several languages, but to the impact of further, especially social and economic, factors.

Inhibitory control

A study done by Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin showed that bilingual children have better inhibitory control, meaning that they are good at ignoring irrelevant perceptual information.^[7] The theory is that bilinguals must constantly sort out extra perceptual information; for every object and action a bilingual has a word in each language that they could potentially use. However, they need to choose a word in the appropriate language based on the context they are in and the rules and social norms that apply to that context. Evidence suggests that in order to select the intended language, bilinguals must inhibit the irrelevant language.^[8] Through constant practice inhibiting one language or the other, bilinguals become experts at selectively attending to appropriate information and filtering out irrelevant information.

This ability lends itself to application in other areas of education also. For example, in mathematical problem solving, many times the first part of the problem is understanding what the question is asking and figuring out what information helps in answering that question and what other information must be found.

Impact on literacy

A study done by Ellen Bialystok, Gigi Luk and Ernest Kwan^[9] showed the impact of knowing one language and writing system on learning another. They compared a group of monolinguals and three groups of bilinguals, with different relationships between English and the second language: for Spanish-English bilinguals the languages are similar and they are both written alphabetically in the same script, for Hebrew-English bilinguals the languages are different but they are both written alphabetically (phonetic Hebrew) in different scripts, for Chinese-English bilinguals both the language and the writing system are different.

The results showed that Spanish-English and Hebrew-English biliterates had the highest levels of literacy. Their interpretation of the results is that bilingualism has two effects on early acquisition of literacy: (1) a general understanding of reading and its basis in a print system and (2) the potential for transfer of reading principles across languages. All bilinguals showed an advantage in these areas over monolinguals, but the more similar the two languages the larger the advantage.

Cortical organization

The neuroscientist Katrin Amunts studied the brain of polyglot Emil Krebs, who mastered 68 languages, and determined that the area of Krebs' brain responsible for language — Broca's area — was organized differently from monolingual men.^[10]

See also

• Multilingualism

References

1. ^ Darcy, N. T. (1963). Bilingualism and the measure of intelligence: Review of a decade of research. Journal of Genetic Psychology: 82, 259-282.
2. ^ Hakuta, Kenji; Bialystok, Ellen (1994). In other words: the science and psychology of second-language acquisition. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 0465075657. 
3. ^ Bialystok E. Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology. 1988;24:560–567.
4. ^ Jim Cummins, "Cognitive/academic language proficiency, linguistic interdependence, the optimum age question and some other matters," Working Papers on Bilingualism, no. 19 (1979), p. 121-129.
5. ^ Elaine Weitzman, "One Language or Two? Home Language or Not? Some Answers to Questions about Bilingualism in Language-Delayed Children," http://www.hanen.org/web/Home/AboutHanen/NewsViews/OneLanguageorTwo/tabid/220/Default.aspx
6. ^ Jeff MacSwan, "The Threshold Hypothesis, semilingualism, and other contributions to a deficit view of linguistic minorities," Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 22, no 1 (2002), p. 3-45.
7. ^ Bialystok E, Martin MM (2004). "Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task". Dev Sci 7 (3): 325–39. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00351.x. PMID 15595373. 
8. ^ Kroll JF, Bobb SC, Misra M, Guo T (2008). "Language selection in bilingual speech: Evidence for inhibitory processes". Acta psychologica 128 (3): 416–430. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.02.001. PMC 2585366. PMID 18358449. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2585366. 
9. ^ Bialystok E, Luk G, Kwan E (2005). "Bilingualism, Biliteracy, and Learning to Read: Interactions Among Languages and Writing Systems". Scientific Studies of Reading 9 (1): 43–61. doi:10.1207/s1532799xssr0901_4. 
10. ^ Gift of the Gab, New Scientist, January 8, 2005 (Michael Erard - Stories)

External links

• One Language or Two: Answers to Questions about Bilingualism in Children
• Bilingual Wiki