Research of Whether The Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism Are Restricted to Language

Due to the recent increase in globalisation and population movements, cultures from all around the world are coming into contact with each other, resulting in a growing number of multicultural societies. These communities lead to families and children who identify with more than one culture, and potentially use different languages for each parent; creating new generations of bilingual children. Multilingual speakers now outnumber monolingual speakers in the world’s population, and as such there has been much investigation into the cognitive effects of bilingualism and any other potential effects that bilingualism may have such as IQ effects or even attention.

Research into the cognitive effects of bilingualism began in the early 20th century, as researchers found what they believed to be a ‘language handicap’ in bilingual children, and for a long time it was believed that there was a link between bilingualism and lower intelligence. It was thought that learning two languages simultaneously could lead to an intellectual and cognitive disadvantage, and also could potentially create linguistic confusion where there should be none in monolingual subjects. This ‘handicap’ led to bilingual children being outcasted from social circles from either of their parents’ cultures, and suffered social isolation.

This was however proven to be not experimentally valid - the results of these early tests were most likely due to the effect of immigration bringing generally lower income, less educated children and comparing them to the highly educated, monolingual children of the rich. In 1962, Pearl and Lambert released a publication with emphasis on their strong systematic methodological approach. Their results showed no negative effects of bilingualism on the development of the cognitive and metalinguistic systems in children. Although evidently there is still controversy around the subject, there is a heavily implied positive link between bilingualism and cognitive development in the majority of publications and experiments worldwide.

After Pearl and Lambert’s study, there was a lot of further research into the positive aspects of bilingualism. In particular, Bialystok’s experiment in 1999 showed an increased ability to perform high control tasks requiring increased cognitive flexibility in bilingual children. Bialystok’s experiment consisted of 60 children, divided into two groups which represented different linguistic ability. One group consisted of children who were bilingual in both Chinese and English, whereas the other group consisted of monolingual English speakers.

All of the children came from the same socioeconomic background and all attended the same school, removing the bias’s caused by teaching quality or geographic location. The children were given vocabulary tests and Visually-cued Recall task in the first session and the Moving Word Task and the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task in the second. The results of the first session shows Bialystok’s prediction to be true – that both groups, the bilingual and the monolingual, showed equivalent levels of receptive vocabulary and they both showed a level of working memory in the Visually-Cued Recall test which were comparable to one another.

However, the interesting result was that of tests which required solving tasks in which the solution was complex and was given with a lot of distracting information. The bilinguals showed much better results than the monolinguals. This result led to the Bialystok’s claim that bilingual children are more able to solve problems which are based on attention and opposing information – and with the results of the tests in session one, the bilingual children gain this ability without the repercussions of reduced cognitive power, as the tests from the early 20th century suggested. This result indicates that bilingual children may possess a higher ability to solve problems requiring selective attention or a high level of control.

Another study performed by Kovacs and Mehler in 2009 on the cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants showed a greater level of executive control among bilinguals. This research aimed to prove that bilingual speakers are obliged to exercise particular cognitive abilities in order to manage speaking two languages effectively. Kovacs and Mehler refer to these executive functions as “mechanisms involved in conflict monitoring, planning, attentional control and the suppression of habitual responses” [1].

Kovacs and Mehler showed that, despite both groups performing equally when tested on learned responses, the bilinguals all showed an increase in their capability to suppress their previously learned responses and update their anticipated actions according to the change in the task provided. Having to process more than one language from birth could therefore be enough to improve executive control, even though language production has not even begun yet. These conclusions support the results of Bialystok.

Recent studies are mainly focused on the positive effects of bilingual development, with the number of publications studying the increase in cognitive ability far outnumbering those which indicated cognitive disadvantages. However, a study by Ben-Zeev in 1977 between Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolingual subjects showed that, despite showing a good performance in verbal transformation tasks and tasks which require the analysis of structural complexity, the bilinguals showed delay in grammatical structures and the acquisition of vocabulary.

Another study was conducted by Hoff et al. in 2011, which studied groups of English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, showing that bilingual children did not acquire each language at the same rate as the monolingual children picked up one language alone. Importantly, the study showed that bilingualism affected both vocabulary and grammatical development rates, however the gap between the two groups closes in around three months, after which the acquisition of these abilities is no longer differentiable. These results show that although there is a short disadvantage for children, it does not take two times as long to acquire 2 languages rather than one.

Children who spoke English along with another language in general scored lower on tests than the monolingual counterparts. Although these results were statistically viable, Bialystok has kept by her research and stated that “there is no reason to believe that bilingual children have a smaller overall vocabulary, in fact their combined vocabulary may be larger than that of monolinguals, or that they have poorer communicative ability than monolinguals, only their vocabulary is distributed across two languages” [2].

In all, it can be deduced that bilingualism as a whole is a very complex field and is extremely difficult to measure. Early investigations suggested that bilingualism in children resulted in impairment to both linguistic and cognitive functions, whereas more recent publications show potential increases to both attention related tasks and acquisition of language as a whole. It has been shown multiple times that, whether negative effects or positive, bilingualism has a very pronounced effect on multiple cognitive functions within the brain, showing a much broader consequence than just the acquisition of a second language.