Multilingual children & multilingual adults

Introduction

This page is the third 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

Context

The advantages of being bilingual are often studied in younger children.

Thus, these benefits may seem to only apply to people who have grown up and developed their brain using two or more languages.

However, the third study, as in its title, has compared the effects in early bilinguals and late bilinguals.

This study found that by comparing both groups and monolinguals, both groups of bilinguals had similar levels of disadvantage in the speed and accuracy of generating words.

They also found the same degree of advantage in non verbal executive function.

Both early and late bilinguals showed less conflict effects than monolinguals in the attentional network task.

These results show that various pros and cons of speaking multiple languages will appear at a similar level for both children and early adults learning another language.

Although some studies find no effects on late bilinguals, the author points out to the fact that the proficiency of these “bilinguals” was only self reported and not verified.

It is common that people overestimate their own level of proficiency in a language and many changes in the brain coming from being multilingual depend on the level of acquisition.

Part 1 : The problems of multilinguals

Part 2 :The unknown effects of multilingualism

Next part : Multilingual brains, are they any different?