The unknown effects of multilingualism

Introduction

This page is the second part of a study of articles.

Beyond Bilingualism: multilingual experience correlates with caudate volume By Alexis Hervais-Adelman, Natalia Egorova, Narly Golestani

2nd language acquisition and bilingualism at an early age and the impact on early cognitive development by ELLEN BIALYSTOK

Cognitive advantages and disadvantages in early and late bilinguals by Sabra D. Pelham and Lise Abrams

The advantages of multilingualism

In the past, multilingualism was thought to confuse children and blocked a normal cognitive development.

Although some parts of this may be true as in the previous part, the notion of multlingualism being “bad” for children doesn’t exist anymore.

Children speaking more than one language were actually found to score higher on several intelligence tests and do better in school.

Apart from school, being able to speak more than one language can break limitations on communication. It can help socialise with more people, adapt to more environments and enjoy them more.

In addition to increased social skills, bilingual children can have advantages in their education.

And an advantage in the acquisition of literary skills.

Although this was only in bilingual children where the two languages had common writing systems such as the alphabet, Kanjis…

Those with different writing systems however, didn’t have any advantage or disadvantage to monolinguals in this aspect.

Non language related advantages

Surprisingly, the advantages of multilinguals don’t stop there.

Multilinguals have been found to be better in several non verbal tasks of executive functions.

One is the Simon or Stroop task.

This task requires the participants to ignore irrelevant but important parts of information and select the relevant ones to select a correct response.

When using one language, the same words in the other languages have been observed to be activated in the brains of multilinguals.

This creates a “language conflict” but also emphasises the need of the ability to block distractors.

A finding that strengthened the similarity of the language conflict and ANT was that some brain regions activated during a language conflict were the same as when inhibiting distractors, task switching and response selection.

And that bilingual children perform better at control of attention, switching mental sets and theory of mind.

Part 1 :