Benefits of Bilingual Brains: How does bilingualism affect language acquisition?

Hablo varios idiomas. Je parle plusieurs langues. Ich spreche mehrere Sprachen. Parlo più lingue. I speak multiple languages.

If you were able to read two or more of the previous sentences, you would be able to consider yourself multilingual. This concept is seen in every corner of the world, with over 50% of the Earth’s population exhibiting this characteristic (Grosjean, 2012). There’s a big push for monolingual people to learn an additional language (or two), but not for the reasons you may think. Besides making a person appear more intelligent and well-versed, multilingualism has major benefits on the brain and its overall health.

Studies have compared brain activity of monolingual and multilingual participants, and the results found that brains that spend time deciphering two or more languages have physiological bonuses, not just societal. Brains busy with constantly interchanging languages on a daily basis seem better off academically, socially, and cognitively.

Multilinguals are known for exhibiting a phenomenon called code switching. This is when people switch between languages within sentences when they are speaking. This “switching” has been proven to enhance executive control, meaning one’s ability to plan and execute tasks (Bialystok, et al, 2012). Studies have found that even in situations where strictly only one language was required, the brain was constantly referencing the other language. Where things can go awry is when attention comes into play. Monolingual speakers only have one “database” to reference in linguistic processing, but bilinguals have two continually competing with each other, which can complicate problem solving and decision making. “This may be the most difficult of all the selection challenges because it is possible for both languages to satisfy a wide range of criteria for the intended utterance, the only difference being determined by the social context,” (Bialystok, 2012). Despite this minor setback, multilinguals have outperformed monolinguals in many areas and tasks from early childhood to late adulthood.

For many young multilingual speakers, they acquire one language at home and the other through education at school. In contrast, there is a big population of monolingual children being taught a second language in a bilingual setting. There are cognitive, social, emotional, health, familial, and educational benefits that come along with learning multiple languages at an early age. It has been found that bilinguals have increased protection against memory loss, Alzheimer’s Disease, and dementia, while also exhibiting decreased levels of anxiety and poor self-esteem (Benson).

Bilingual education also brings in cultural and societal factors, like whether or not parents want their children to be learning Hindi, Spanish, or Chinese. Immigrant parents who are deeply rooted in their native culture may be thrilled about their children continuing to speak their native and first language, while, on the other hand, some parents may prioritize assimilation for their children and make them only speak English. These factors, aside from possible health benefits of multilingualism, can be just as important or more important for people making major life changes that will affect their culture, family, and education in the future.

1. Fact or Fiction: Children that grow up learning two languages at the same time often confuse the two, which ultimately is a detriment to their cognitive abilities. (FICTION)

- It is proven that bilingualism does not do damage one’s cognitive abilities, but rather strengthens them. Switching between languages strengthens the brain’s flexibility in thinking and executive control.

2. The amount of time a person takes to learn a language is directly related to exposure to that language (FICTION)

- Yes, exposure helps, but learning a language and being able to speak it well is dependent on when you start and the amount of “comprehensible input” we receive (Center for Second Language Research).

3. Like other systems in our bodies, there is a finite window of time during childhood where we are most susceptible to lingual input, thus making it the prime time to learn language (Arnold). (FACT)

- This phenomenon is called a critical period. It occurs in language acquisition, eyesight, hearing, motor function, and many other systems in the human body.

4. Bilingual education has been proved to slow the learning process in students (FICTION).

- This just isn’t the case. Lytle makes a comparison between solving math problems and the ways bilinguals take advantage of their two languages. “… you have to think about different ways you might solve a problem, in the same way if you’re growing up in a bilingual household you need to think of different words… if you can’t activate a word in one language, you need to think of a different way to describe the word,” (Benson).

5. The academic problems some children of immigrant families in the United States face are due to learning disabilities, since they can understand English enough to get by. (FICTION)

- Learning disabilities and differences in languages are two completely separate things. Sure, it would be hard for anyone to be immersed in an English-speaking classroom when he or she only speaks French, but this doesn’t mean a disability is present.

6. Language disorders are diagnosable abnormalities that affect a person’s production and/or comprehension of a language, where as language differences occur when there’s a communication barrier between two people due to a difference in languages spoken. (FACT)

- These two are commonly mistaken for each other, though they are certainly different. A disorder or any kind is an irregularity in a system of the body, while a difference is just due to differences in culture, society, family, etc.

7. The true definition of multilingualism, by Webster’s, is “using or able to use several languages especially with equal fluency.” (FACT)

- The key here is “with equal fluency.” I am a native English speaker, who learned Spanish starting in seventh grade and is now minoring in it here at UConn. I have been studying Spanish and speaking it for eight or so years now, and I consider myself nowhere near fluent. Fluent means knowing every word for everything as my senior year high school Spanish teacher explained when he pointed to the comfy desk chair wheels and asked me what I would call that in Spanish.

This year, I have been fortunate enough to work in a research lab on campus that combines two of my passions: speech and Spanish. I have been working with Dr. Adrián García-Sierra and our lab team in analyzing data on monolingual and bilingual speakers and differences in their speech perception and production. We look at how babies with bilingual parents perceive both languages and how they can detect differences between them. We interpreted a set of graphs (figure 1) showing that bilingual speakers of Spanish and English at 30 months produce more words (combined in both languages) than monolingual English speakers of the same age. These two graphs work in tandem to depict how bilingual brains generally learn more words (around 750 by 30 months) than solely English speakers (around 600 words). Yes, this is a combined amount between English and Spanish in this case, but it is pretty impressive for a young toddler to be able to differentiate between the phonemic, morphological, grammatical, and semantic differences (and also the difficulties associated with parents’ accents). Our lab is one of many around the world that focuses on language acquisition and bilingualism in this way, and we are just scraping the surface of our understanding of the brain and its endless capabilities.

References

Bialystok, E. (2011). Reshaping the Mind: The Benefits of Bilingualism. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Experimentale, 65(4), 229–235. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0025406

Arnold, Shanti. (n.d).Common Myths About Bilingualism. Myths about

Bilingualism, Multilingual Societies, and Language Rights. Hawai’i: Hawai'i Council for Second Language Research.

Benson, John. (2013). Bilingual Education Holds Cognitive, Social And Health Benefits (INFOGRAPHIC). The Huffington Post.

Grosjean, Francois, Ph.D. (2012). How Many Are We? Psychology Today.