Research and policy
Research: The Cognitive Consequences of Early Bilingualism
28 Jul 2010
In a Zero to Three (November 2008) article Hanako Yoshida PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Houston, discusses her research around the effects of early bilingualism. Yoshida reports that recent research is leading cognitive scientists to believe that learning and using more than one language is a common aspect of human cognition. And that using and learning more than one language has “significant positive effects” in terms of an individual being able to use information obtained from the environment to “spontaneously restructure one’s knowledge”.
She writes: “Researchers have discovered that the cognitive systems of bilingual children differ from those of monolingual children in some remarkable ways. Learning, speaking and using two languages may affect fundamental aspects of cognitive and neural development, potentially influencing the way those systems learn and represent information.
“The positive effects of bilingualism are seen most profoundly in what are known as executive function (or self-control) tasks.” Executive function tasks require children to suppress their natural response patterns. In other words, they are those tasks which ask a child not to take sweets when told not to. They are important because they are positively related to classroom success. Bilingual children appear to show a more advanced ability to engage in executive function tasks.
Yoshida acknowledges that the extent and kind of bilingualism that fosters increased self-control is not known. She hypothesises that bilingual children “inhibit the words in one language to speak the other language” thus strengthening, through practice, the neural pathways associated with control and impulse suppression. She backs this hypothesis up by citing a few recent studies that show that the same pathways which are used to control attention are also used to separate and suppress languages.
Yoshida also asked whether knowledge acquired by a bilingual child in one language is transferred to the other language. The answer was a strong yes – depending on the child’s abilities in both languages. This means that learning a new idea in one language may benefit the child in its attempts to understand it in another language. All of which suggests that the benefits from being bilingual go beyond behavioural control.
