Growing up bilingual holds benefits more than burdens
By hola | Published | 2 Comments
Until about fifty years ago, being bilingual was widely seen as bad for you— a portend of lifelong broken English, illiteracy and poverty. 
Since then, scientists have proved just the opposite: that speaking more than one language actually makes you smarter. “It doesn’t matter which the two languages are, we see benefits in cognition,” says Ellen Bialystok, the Canadian psychologist at York University and author of “Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition.” According to Bialystok and other leading researchers on bilingualism, the advantages to fluency in more than one language can be observed in infants and carry over into old age. Babies in bilingual households develop the ability to toggle between languages even before they can talk, studies show. “Crib bilinguals” as young as 7-months-old can recognize when a speaker switches from one language to another even when it’s a made up language or one they’ve never heard before. “It’s all about attention,” Bialystok says. “In the first year of life, before the infant utters a single word, the way they pay attention to language is different. It has to do with the ability to control their attention and notice cues in their environment.”
THE BILINGUAL BRAIN
Bilinguals’ brains develop differently, as well. “Even when monolinguals and bilinguals appear to be performing equally, their brains are firing in very different ways. Bilinguals have more efficient brain data,” Bialystok says. In fact, researchers at Lund University in Sweden published a paper last year suggesting that learning foreign languages may actually “grow” you brain—specifically the hippocampus and parts of the cerebral cortex. They used MRI scans to examine the brains of a group of Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy recruits enrolled in intensive foreign language courses. After three months the recruits’ brains had grown, while there was no change in the brain sizes of group of university medical students who were also studying intensely but weren’t taking any foreign language courses. The results were published in the scientific journal NeuroImage. Studies involving senior citizens have found the onset of Alzheimer’s disease typically happens five years later in bilingual patients compared to monolinguals. Other research shows that elderly bilinguals benefit from “cognitive reserves” that keep their brains functioning more youthfully. At the University of Kentucky, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare two groups of healthy adults, ages 60-68. One group was bilingual since childhood; the other was comprised of monolinguals. Not only did the bilinguals switch between tasks more quickly, they showed distinct patterns of brain activity. Lead researcher Brian Gold said the findings, 
published in January in The Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that not only do bilinguals use their brains more efficiently, lifelong bilingualism may support the healthy functioning of the brain’s frontal regions as aging occurs. While some of the advantages bilinguals enjoy are hard wired, so to speak, others are more conceptual. People who speak more than one language understand, for instance, that, “a tree” is also “un árbol,” says Georgetown University linguistics professor Cristina Sanz. “The monolingual child thinks that the thing is the word,” she says. “Bilinguals can separate the name from the thing or concept.” Possessing this knowledge allows bilinguals to develop more effective learning strategies compared to people who only know one language. Just like playing the piano, the longer you practice bilingualism that greater this “cognitive edge,” experts say.
THE COGNITIVE EDGE
This edge includes more mentally flexibility, creative thinking and problem solving skills, and better “executive control” in shuttling between languages and other activities, according to scientists. “When you are bilingual, both languages are always ‘on’ but you repress one to speak in the other,” Sanz said. “It’s like taking the brain to the gym. If you are a bilingual person you are exercising executive control at all times.” Benefits are seen also in working memory. Our minds, like computers, can only retain so much information and the more mental space is devoted to “processing,” the less there is for storage. Bilinguals have more “automated” language knowledge —they can switch to a sort of “autopilot” more often than monolinguals. Since they have less to “process,” their brains have more room for storing information.
BILITERACY
Reading and writing in two languages—that is to say, being “biliterate”— further enhances “metalinguistic awareness,” according to Sanz’ investigations with Spanish high school students fluent in Spanish and the regional Catalan language spoke in Spain’s Barcelona region. Similar conclusions emerged from a 2011 Israeli study of two groups of 6th graders learning English as a foreign language. One group was fluent in Hebrew only; the other was comprised of immigrants whose first language was Russian. Not only did the Russian biliterates pick up more English, their grasp of Hebrew grammar was better than that of their peers. A 2012 comparison of Scottish and Italian elementary school children provided more evidence of a biliterate advantage. In addition to English, half of the Scottish students also spoke Gaelic, while the Italian research, conducted on the island of Sardinia, involved one group that only spoke Italian and another that also spoke Sardinian. The bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals in two of four cognitive ability tests. Lead researcher, Fraser Lauchlan, a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, said in an email that “initially we were surprised by how neatly the results turned out,” with the Scottish bilinguals scoring the highest, followed by the Sardinian bilinguals, and the Scottish and Sardinian monolinguals, respectively, bringing up the rear. Examining the findings for statistical significance illuminated something else, as well, Lauchlan says: The Scottish bilinguals significantly outperformed the other three group on three of the four tests, “a result,” he says, “that we felt could be explained by the formal education that the Scottish bilinguals were receiving in both languages, as compared to the Sardinian bilinguals who were only being taught in Italian.” (There’s no standardized written form of Sardinian and it’s not taught in school, Lauchlan explained.) 
“[T]he Scottish bilingual kids were biliterate whereas the Sardinian bilingual kids were not… Thus, we concluded that it was really the balanced nature of the bilingualism of the Scottish children, and indeed, their biliteracy, that contributed to the positive differences in their favour.” But unlike the advantages of speaking two languages, transferring literacy skills from one language to another is apparently not so straightforward. In Bialystok’s study of English-French, English-Spanish, and English-Chinese speaking children who were learning to read, for instance, the English-Chinese group performed no better than the monolinguals in the study. The results confounded researchers, she says, since previous research documented a biliterate advantage even in languages as different as Hebrew and Russian. Both of those languages have a common denominator, however: that “letters make sounds.” Once students mastered this phonological concept, they could transfer it to other languages. The Chinese-English bilingual children weren’t able to make the same conceptual leap because the Chinese written system relies on symbols that convey meaning, not sound.
LINGERING MISCONCEPTIONS
Bilingualism has a few downsides too. Bilinguals typically know fewer words in each language than the average monolingual, though their combined vocabulary may be larger. And bilinguals usually exhibit slower response times on some tests, apparently a function of the millisecond lag while the brain decides which language to use. But biggest disadvantage U.S. bilinguals face is perhaps the lingering misconception about being bilingual, as Sanz found out when her son, David, attended a Georgetown pre-school, several years ago. After the toddler scored poorly on a standardized vocabulary test, his teacher concluded that learning both languages simultaneously was preventing him from mastering English and recommended his parents to stop speaking to him in Spanish. Such ideas were first debunked a watershed 1962 study but have lingered, partly because of the way bilingual children develop language skills. Not only do their vocabularies typically lag monolinguals, bilingual preschoolers sometimes start speaking later and engage in “code switching” (such as Spanglish, in the case of English-Spanish bilinguals). By time they enter kindergarten, however, most have mastered both languages and are primed for learning to read and write. While the cognitive edge may offer parents reason enough bring up bilingual children, for immigrant families, Bialystok says, the “psycho-cognitive” boost may be even more important since language “connects you to your ancestry and who you are.”
—Christine MacDonald
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