The Bilingual Advantage

The Bilingual Advantage
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: May 30, 2011

Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States. Is it still? [Sam: American psychologists believed in the 1950s that exposure to a foreign language early in life would confuse the child. This outdated belief still dominates the main stream education in HK.]

Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that normally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function. In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?_r=1

"People who are bilingual early on in life have a certain advantage in other domains outside of language," Lebedeva said.

I-LABS research has shown that multilingual people, including children, are more flexible thinkers and therefore better at problem-solving.

[http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014798386_apwafostercarestudy1stldwritethru.html ]