More on the advantages of child bilingualism…

A fascinating new study by Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler offers further  evidence that bilingualism enhances cognitive control in children. Despite popular myths about the need to teach “one language first”, a growing literature shows that bilingualism actually improves a child’s long-term language development.

The study authors tested the ability of 7-month-old pre-lingual babies to modify “a previously learned response and found that those raised in a bilingual home were able to do this, whereas babies from a monolingual home were not.

Dozens of babies learned that when they heard certain nonsense words, a puppet would always appear on the same side of a screen. All the babies – whether from monolingual or bilingual homes – soon learned to anticipate the appearance of the puppet, and shifted their eyes promptly to the appropriate side of the screen.

During the second phase of the experiment, the location of the puppet moved to the other side of the screen. Crucially, the babies from bilingual homes managed to learn to anticipate the new location, but the babies with monolingual parents did not – they were stuck on the previously learned response. The bilingual babies, by contrast, appeared to have the cognitive control needed to inhibit the previous response.

This difference between the two groups of babies persisted even when the task was made easier by using different nonsense words for when the puppet changed location, and it also persisted when visual stimuli, rather than spoken words, were used to cue puppet appearance.

The researchers said their findings suggested there’s an early mental benefit of being raised in a bilingual environment – one that’s apparent even before a baby can utter any words of their own. “Just processing two languages and having to deal with the representations of each of them is sufficient for enhancing cognitive control,” the researchers said.

Full story at BPS Research Digest

Original research article here