Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. However, over the past decade, ample evidence has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking. The evidence suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function which directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks.
The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear —impacts infants, babies, children and even adults into their twilight years. “What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.”
There’s a system in your brain known as the executive control system -it’s the general manager of the brain- and its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. Children raised bilingual use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient. The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals is quite basic: a heightened ability to monitor their environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often -it requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when, for example, driving.” The bilinguals, they found, possess more efficiently the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.
Beyond even language-orientated development, research has seen is that on certain kinds of nonverbal tests, bilingual children are faster. Why? When the researchers observed the brain through neuroimaging, they found that the childs brain was using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.
A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: the bilingual experience appears to influence the brain even into old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life). Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease symptoms.
The takeaway: the opportunity to raise a bilingual child opens them to the possibility of advanced cognitive development, but the benefits of practicing a second language maintains benefits for all ages.
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html?_r=2&smid=fb-nytimes&
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html
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