Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewFeature ReviewBilingualism: consequences for mind and brain
Section snippets
Why bilingualism?
It is generally believed that more than half of the world's population is bilingual [1]. In each of the U.S.A.1 and Canada2
What is different about bilingual minds?
It has long been assumed that childhood bilingualism affected developing minds, but the belief was that the consequences for children were negative: learning two languages would be confusing [8]. A study by Peal and Lambert [9] cast doubt on this belief by reporting that children in Montreal who were either French-speaking monolinguals or English–French bilinguals performed differently on a battery of tests. The authors had expected to find lower scores in the bilingual group on language tasks
Joint activation of languages
A logical possibility for the organization of a bilingual mind is that it consists of two independently-represented language systems that are uniquely accessed in response to the context: a fluent French–English bilingual ordering coffee in a Parisian café has no reason to consider how to form the request in English, and a Cantonese–English bilingual studying psychology in Boston does not need to recast the material through Chinese. Yet, substantial evidence shows that this is not how the
Bilingual performance on conflict tasks
Early evidence that bilingual children solved non-verbal conflict tasks differently from monolingual children was reported in a study by Bialystok and Majumder [17]. Eight-year-old children were given a variety of non-verbal problems to solve, some of which contained perceptual distraction (block design from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, WISC [67]) and some which did not (Noelting's Juice Task 68, 69). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on the conflict tasks, but
The nature of the bilingual advantage
Why might bilingualism be associated with an advantage in attentional control? The need to manage two jointly activated languages apparently leads to an enhancement of frontal-posterior attentional control mechanisms with the consequence that other types of cognitive control are also enhanced. Inhibitory control was suggested as the relevant mechanism in early studies 40, 57 and continues to be endorsed by some researchers 47, 111. One problem with this account, however, is the recurrent
Bilingualism and dementia
The finding that bilingualism enhances cognitive control raises the possibility that lifelong bilingualism protects against age-related cognitive decline, and may even postpone the onset of symptoms of dementia. In this case, bilingualism may be one of the environmental factors that contribute to cognitive reserve or brain reserve [116]. Cognitive reserve is the idea that engagement in stimulating physical or mental activity can act to maintain cognitive functioning in healthy aging and
Concluding remarks
In the first study reporting the surprising outcome of an advantage in cognitive and linguistic performance by bilingual children, Peal and Lambert concluded: ‘Intellectually [the bilingual child's] experience with two language systems seems to have left him with a mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental abilities’ ([9], p. 20). Peal and Lambert did not explain what they meant by ‘mental flexibility’ but the description works well to describe the
Acknowledgments
Preparation of this manuscript was supported by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to E.B.; grant A8261 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to F.I.M.C.; and grant MOP57842 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to E.B. and F.I.M.C. We thank Steven Lovasz for his assistance in preparing the manuscript.
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