Thalita Cortes | December 04, 2012 3:05 pm

Want your children to be well-behaved, attentive, self-controlled? Want them to learn quickly and more easily than other children? You can start by speaking another language. New research suggests that children who are exposed to more than one language while very young are more likely to behave better and learn quicker than those who hear only one language.

Up until the late 1990s, scientists believed that being bilingual slowed down language and speech development, saying that children struggle  to learn two sets of vocabulary and grammar at the same time. Yet studies throughout the past decade are showing the opposite: infants are capable of distinguishing between two languages before they are even one year old. These children gain an advantage in other cognitive skills as well including conflict assessment, planning, attention control, and suppression of habitual responses. In other words, those children with strong cognitive skills can better foresee problems and plan ahead to solve them. They also respond to change faster by suppressing habits, that is, holding back a previously learned responses in order to form new ones. These abilities are collectively known as cognitive control and are closely linked to language in the brain.

In 2009, a set of experiments involving bilingual and monolingual infants tested for any differences in cognition. Seven month old infants were placed in front of a screen with two white squares on opposite sides of the screen. In each experiment, a cue was given and a visual reward appeared inside one of the squares. Researchers expected infants to learn that a cue preceded a reward and to look in that direction before it appeared.

The cues consisted of either meaningless tri-syllabic words or a three-part pattern of common shapes such as triangles and circles. The experiments involved both auditory and visual  cues to ensure that they were testing the brain and cognition as a whole, not only the auditory processing of language. After the same cue was repeated nine times, a new cue was given and the reward appeared in the square on the opposite side of the screen. By looking at the correct side following a cue, the children demonstrated that they recognized the change in signals and adapted their response accordingly.

The results were dramatic. All infants learned to anticipate the reward following the first cue, demonstrating equal information processing skills. When cues and rewards were switched, however, monolingual infants were unable to change the habit of looking for the reward on the previous side of the screen. Only bilingual infants were able to pick up on the new cue and re-learn the response. To do so, they had tostay attentive, identify a conflict, and hold back the previously learned response, demonstrating enhanced cognitive control.

The reasons for this dramatic difference in cognition are still unclear. Scientists speculate that bilingual infants must continually assess “conflict” between the sounds of two different languages. In response to changes, they suppress certain reactions. Therefore, when switching from one language to another bilingual infants are able to practice their cognitive control and strengthen these abilities.

This skill is necessary in many situations: in a classroom, for example, bilingual children are less likely to shout out of turn because they have learned to inhibit undesirable actions. Or when solving a puzzle, bilingual individuals see the central conflict more readily and are able to solve it quicker. Thus, while certain books and movies may make your baby smarter, perhaps the best thing you can do is simply expose them to another language. Continual exposure improves general components of cognitive control and makes children, not only smarter, but more attentive and self-controlled.

References:
Kovacs, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 106(16), 6556-60. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/106/16/6556

Categorized under: Language, Bilingual, Child Development, Learning


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