The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 survey found that 18 percent of Americans older than 5 spoke a language other than English at home. Children in these households grow up with a working knowledge of two or more languages and switch between them depending on where they are, who they are with and what they are doing. Educators used to think bilingualism left children confused and slow to learn; as of 2011, they believe that bilingual children learn at least as rapidly as monolinguals and are usually earlier in developing cognitive powers such as perception, judgment, reasoning and memory.
How Babies Learn Languages
Each language has its own set of characteristic sounds. Babies learn to distinguish these sets in their first months. Studies of how newborns respond to speech by increased sucking suggest babies become familiar even before birth with their mother's language or languages, according to the Association for Psychological Sciences journal "Observer."
During their first year, babies appear to develop a distinct neural circuit for each language they hear. Monolingual babies are earlier than bilinguals to notice small differences distinguishing similar-sounding words, while bilinguals tend to learn words holistically by matching objects to words in both their languages. By 20 months, the difference fades, and thereafter bilingual children tend to learn more words faster in both languages. They also gradually learn not to mix them.
Focus, Memory and Flexibility
Bilingualism confers advantages in three major, inter-related aspects of cognitive development: focus, flexibility and memory. Pre-school bilingual children appear better able than monolingual children to focus on instructions and ignore distractions by blocking out irrelevant information. This may be because they are accustomed to selecting one language while suppressing another, researchers reported in 2004 in the journal "Developmental Science."
Bilinguals realize early on that words are separate from the objects they name — a meta-linguistic concept that enables them to readily translate or substitute words from one language to another. This flexibility helps them solve problems, think creatively and switch perspectives or languages. Even at 7 months, bilingual babies responded faster than monolinguals to changing spoken or visual cues.
Working memory enables you to hold ideas in mind and manipulate them, for example in mental math. Two studies, the results of which were published in 2009, showed that bilingual 7-year-olds outperformed monolingual peers in exercises involving visual-spatial working memory.
Words and Concepts
Bilingual elementary-school children sometimes score less highly than monolinguals on the number of words they know. However, the differences disappear when the tests take into account the numbers known in both languages. Perhaps because they accept language as a system of symbols organized by rules of grammar, bilingual children tend to be advanced in forming concepts and perceiving rules, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association reports. They suppress irrelevant information more efficiently than monolinguals in both linguistic comprehension and non-linguistic tasks, and are slightly better at organizing words by theme or type — for example, grouping animal names or recognizing doing/describing words.
Other Cognitive Gains
Bilingual households usually have friends and relations from a range of backgrounds. Being able to communicate with them helps a child share and understand other people’s outlook and culture. In turn, greater social interaction can foster imagination and understanding. Researchers suggest that bilingual children are often ahead in storytelling skills, analogical reasoning and additional language learning, because bilingualism encourages good listening skills, flexible thinking and sensitivity to language.
However, bilingualism is one of many economic, social and family factors affecting cognitive ability, and all children develop at their own pace.
References
- Center for Applied Linguistics; Raising Bilingual Children: Common Parental Concerns and Current Research; Kendall King and Lyn Fogle; 2006
- "Observer"; Bilingual Babies: The Roots of Bilingualism in Newborns; K. Byers-Hemlein, et al.; March 2010
- Bilingual Readers: Your Baby is a Language-Learning Machine
- Babies Today; Development in Bilingual Infants; Teri Brown
- "Developmental Science"; Attention and Inhibition in Bilingual Children: Evidence From the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task; Ellen Bialystok and Michelle M. Martin; 2004
- "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences": Cognitive Gains in 7-Month-Old Bilingual Infants"; Agnes Melinda Kovacs, et al.; April 21, 2009
