And research has demonstrated that students who study a foreign language perform better in other subject areas. Lifelong bilingualism has been shown to slow the detrimental effects of natural aging on neurological efficiency. She notes that the advantage is correlated with the age at which a person acquires the second language. So earlier bilingualism leads to more pronounced brain benefits. Professor Strid also cites recent research that has shown the onset of dementia occurs on average four to five years later in bilinguals than monolinguals.
Knowing a second language expands your study abroad horizon because some programs have language requirements, Barbe says. For example, English cannot easily express levels of respect found in languages such as Korean or Japanese. Half of all employers in northern Illinois plan to hire more bilingual or multilingual college…. While the stock market is trading near all-time highs, many investors are getting antsy, waiting…. Unlike German, English has the -ing ending to describe actions that are ongoing.
This makes English speakers much less likely than German speakers to assign a goal to an action when describing an ambiguous scene. When he tested English—German bilinguals, however, whether they were action- or goal-focused depended on which country they were tested in. In the s, one of the pioneers of psycholinguistics, Susan Ervin-Tripp, tested Japanese—English bilingual women, asking them to finish sentences in each language.
She found that the women ended the sentences very differently depending on which language was used. From this, Ervin-Tripp concluded that human thought takes place within language mindsets, and that bilinguals have different mindsets for each language — an extraordinary idea but one that has been borne out in subsequent studies, and many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language.
These different mindsets are continually in conflict, however, as bilingual brains sort out which language to use. In a revealing experiment with his English-German bilingual group, Athanasopoulos got them to recite strings of numbers out loud in either German or English.
So-called "hyper-polyglots", like Alex Rawlings mentioned in this story, have learnt to speak at least 10 languages. They claim that anyone could learn their skills if only you take the right approach. To learn more, read our in-depth feature article here. Searching for a word in one language - while suppressing the corresponding word in another - gently taxes the brain, helping to train our concentration Credit: Getty Images.
Are there really two separate minds in a bilingual brain? In order to assess the effect that trying to understand the Syntaflake language had on my brain, I took another test before and after the snowflake task. In these so-called flanker tasks , patterns of arrows appeared on the screen and I had to press the left or right button according to the direction of the arrow in the centre.
Sometimes the surrounding pattern of arrows was confusing, so by the end of the first session my shoulders had been hunched somewhere near my ears and I was exhausted from concentrating. How can that be? I had to block out my impulse and heed the rule instead. The aim is to say which colour each word is written in, but this is tricky, because we read the word much quicker than we process the colour of the letters. Located on the frontal lobe, it is a toolbox of mental attention skills that enables us to concentrate on one task while blocking out competing information, and allows us to switch focus between different tasks without becoming confused.
It is the executive system that tells us to go when we see a green light and stop for a red, and it is the same system that tells us to ignore the meaning of the word we read but concentrate on the colour of the letters. The snowflake test prepared my ACC for the second flanker task, just as speaking more than one language seems to train the executive system more generally.
A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people.
In fact, says cognitive neuropsychologist Jubin Abutalebi, at the University of San Raffaele in Milan, it is possible to distinguish bilingual people from monolinguals simply by looking at scans of their brains.
The ACC is like a cognitive muscle, he adds: the more you use it, the stronger, bigger and more flexible it gets. Bilinguals, it turns out, exercise their executive control all the time because their two languages are constantly competing for attention. Brain-imaging studies show that when a bilingual person is speaking in one language, their ACC is continually suppressing the urge to use words and grammar from their other language.
Not only that, but their mind is always making a judgement about when and how to use the target language. For example, bilinguals rarely get confused between languages, but they may introduce the odd word or sentence of the other language if the person they are talking to also knows it. Speaking a second language can help forestall the symptoms of dementia Credit: Getty Images. A superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus, better mental flexibility and multitasking skills are, of course, valuable in everyday life.
But perhaps the most exciting benefit of bilingualism occurs in ageing, when executive function typically declines: bilingualism seems to protect against dementia. Psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok made the surprising discovery at York University in Toronto while she was comparing an ageing population of monolinguals and bilinguals.
It means that as parts of the brain succumb to damage, bilinguals can compensate more because they have extra grey matter and alternative neural pathways.
However, it is no good simply to have learned a little French at school. The effect depends on how often you use your bilingual skill. Bilingualism can also offer protection after brain injury. In a recent study of stroke survivors in India, Bak discovered that cognitive recovery was twice as likely for bilinguals as for monolinguals. Such results suggest bilingualism helps keep us mentally fit.
It may even be an advantage that evolution has positively selected for in our brains — an idea supported by the ease with which we learn new languages and flip between them, and by the pervasiveness of bilingualism throughout world history. Just as we need to do physical exercise to maintain the health of bodies that evolved for a physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle, perhaps we ought to start doing more cognitive exercises to maintain our mental health, especially if we only speak one language.
In recent years, there has been a backlash against the studies showing benefits from bilingualism. Some researchers tried and failed to replicate some of the results; others questioned the benefits of improved executive function in everyday life. Bak wrote a rejoinder to the published criticisms, and says there is now overwhelming evidence from psychological experiments backed by imaging studies that bilingual and monolingual brains function differently.
He says the detractors have made errors in their experimental methods. Immersing children in a second language may help benefit their performance in all subjects Credit: Getty Images.
No Comments Here are 10 benefits of being bilingual: 1. Increase brain power. It can give children an academic advantage. Increase awareness of other cultures. Make travel easier and more enjoyable. Improve competitiveness in the job market. Find it easier to learn a third language. You can better raise your kids bilingual. Stay mentally stronger for longer. Improve social life. It can make you more attractive! Download on iOS Download on Android. Popular Posts.
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