The Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism
It used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing—that it would confuse or hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn't have been more wrong.
Learning new languages is an exercise for the mind. It is the equivalent of going to a gym every day.
In the bilingual brain, all our languages are active all at the same time. The continual effort of suppressing one language when speaking another, along with the mental challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain. It improves our concentration, problem-solving, memory, and, in turn, our creativity.
It's now widely accepted that there are huge benefits to being bilingual. A key breakthrough came back in 2007 in Toronto when Ellen Bialystok and her team made a discovery that shook the scientific community and had massive real-world implications.
It was the first study to suggest that bilingual people—people who speak more than one language—develop dementia four to four and a half years later than those who don't. It was a powerful confirmation of the idea of cognitive reserve.
Now, what is cognitive reserve? Cognitive reserve is the idea that people develop a reserve of thinking abilities, and this protects them against losses that can occur through aging and disease, as well as delaying the onset of dementia. People have also been shown to recover significantly better after a stroke.
Learning anything new helps build cognitive reserve, but there's something special about language. Language is particularly broad and complex. It affects ideas and concepts, perception, and different sounds. The more complex a certain skill is, the more likely it is to have a positive effect on cognitive reserve.
When Is the Best Time to Learn a Language?
So, when is the best time to learn a new language? Well, here's part of the answer.
The brain is a complex set of neural networks. When you're learning a new language as a child, you're building new networks. But when you learn a language later in life, you have to modify the existing networks and make more connections. Because learning languages later in life can be more challenging, the benefits can also be greater.
But a 2023 study suggests that this is just part of the story.
The study invited three groups of children aged 8 to 10. We had a group of children who were monolinguals, a group of children who had early exposure to Greek and English from birth (our early bilinguals), and finally, a group who had been exposed to English between the ages of two and five (our later bilinguals).
What we did that no one had done before was ask the children to lie in the scanner while doing nothing—just staring at a cross. During this, we measured their brain activity.
What we found, which was really exciting for us, was that our early bilingual group had the strongest connectivity in the network at rest. This set of regions are regions that light up when we're doing nothing and just mind-wandering a little bit.
Just like if you go to the gym every day, your muscles might look bigger at rest, your brain might be better connected at rest because you learned a language early—and this is something no one had found before.
The Social and Emotional Impact of Bilingualism
And there's more.
One lesser-known behavioral effect of bilingualism, in both children and adults, is the ability to see other people's perspectives—to understand that it is possible to have different points of view.
Recent studies have also found that people tend to react more emotionally in their first language and more rationally and abstractly in their second. The way this is usually explained is that the first language is the one we use to speak with family in informal settings, while the second language is usually learned at school, university, or work.
Scientists are discovering new benefits of being bilingual all the time. And it's not just our brains that benefit.
Learning new languages and speaking more than one language is very important, not only for individuals but also for societies.
Learning new languages can open doors to new cultural experiences, life opportunities, different people, different communities, and different ways of seeing the world.
And with that, we'll say a final goodbye.
Bye.
Source: BBC Ideas. (2023, October 12). Why being bilingual is good for your brain | BBC Ideas [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzHY-muy2Mw