According to a new study, adults who grew up speaking two different languages can shift their attention between different tasks more quickly than those who learn a second language later in life. This is just one of the many cognitive benefits of bilingualism.
Research has shown that bilingual children constantly switch between two languages in their brains, increasing ‘cognitive flexibility’, the ability to switch between thinking about different concepts or multiple concepts at once, and ‘selective attention capabilities’, the mental process of focusing . on one task or object at a time.
Other studies have shown that bilingual children can solve mental puzzles faster and more efficiently than children who speak only one language. The reason? Speaking two languages requires “executive functioning,” which is higher level cognitive skills such as planning, decision making, problem solving and organization. In short, this task is training for the brain.
In the new study, bilingual adults took part in an experiment that required looking at images on a screen that gradually changed and noticing the changes. The adults who started speaking a second language as babies were able to notice the changes much more quickly than those who learned another language later in life.
Bilingual children should “benefit from multiple sources of visual information, such as mouth movements, facial expressions and subtle gestures,” when they have grown up in a more complex language environment, Dean D’Souza, study author and psychology teacher at Anglia Ruskin University said in a press release.
“Babies from bilingual families are adapting to their more complex language environment by sampling more of their visual environment and giving more weight to new information,” the study authors wrote.
When children learn a second language at a young age (between 0 and 3 years), their brains are more plastic, which makes it easier.
It’s important that the mental benefits of starting a new language early seem to last even as children grow up, D’Souza said in the release.
If you are monolingual but hoping to teach your kids another language, there are ways to introduce it to your home. For example, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, singing and listening to music in another language, watching educational language TV programs, and taking language lessons are all options for introducing children to other languages.
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