Two are better than one

Antonella Sorace

This article was originally published in Children in Scotland

magazine (January 2009, p.14-15). For further

information, and to subscribe to this title, please visit www.childreninscotland.org.uk.!

14 Children in Scotland January 2009

Two are better thanonefamilies

Antonella Sorace explains how bilingualism might affect children and answerssome questions about living and speaking with two languages

Do you want to raise your child bilingual but are not sure howto do it? Do you worry about how bilingualism might affectyour child’s school achievement? Are you concerned that yourchild has stopped speaking your language and wants to use onlythe other language? Do you worry that you child is not sayingmuch in either language? Do you want to know more abouthow the mind of a bilingual child works?

Antonella Sorace, Professor of Developmental Linguistics at theUniversity of Edinburgh, decided to set up Bilingualism Matters, anew information and advice service for families and educatorswith her research group because she noticed how growing upwith more than one language is often regarded as ‘special’, andbilingualism is often still surrounded by false beliefs,misconceptions, or simply lack of information. Many people areready to believe that handling two languages at the same timeis too much of a burden for the infant’s brain, or that thelanguages compete for resources in the brain at the expense ofgeneral cognitive development.These opinions often informdecisions – by parents, professional educators, policy makers –that end up affecting children’s lives. Many new parents whowant their children to speak two languages for family reasonsare likely to have heard somewhere that exposure to twolanguages can cause problems, so they may abandonbilingualism before they even give it a try, or may plan tointroduce one of the languages only after the other is ‘wellestablished’ and then find to their regret that the secondlanguage never has a chance. If they successfully establishbilingualism in their pre-school children, they may well be madeto feel that they’ve created a problem by well-meaning primaryschool teachers, who are often ready to blame bilingualism forany performance problems. In this situation the parents mayabandon successful bilingualism and even make active efforts tore-establish monolingualism to ‘cure’ the problem. Given thesociological repercussions of these folk linguistic beliefs, itseems valuable to bridge the gap between the scientificapproach to the study of bilingual cognition and what manypeople believe about life with two languages.

Research on bilingual language and cognition shows that thehuman brain is perfectly capable of dealing with two or morelanguages simultaneously from birth. In many parts of the worldgrowing up multilingual is the norm: if children hear enough ofboth languages and have enough motivation and fun, they willpick them up.What many people don’t know is that theexperience of dealing with two languages seems to givebilingual children some general cognitive advantages in otherdomains.These advantages are particularly evident in tasks thatinvolve cognitive flexibility and the control of attention: bilingual

children seem to be better at selectively paying attention, atinhibiting irrelevant information, and at switching betweenalternative solution to a problem. In contrast, such children donot seem to have an advantage over monolinguals with respectto functions that depend on the way knowledge is represented.For example, they don’t seem to be any better at encodingproblems, accessing relevant knowledge, or drawing logicalinferences.

What is the link between enhanced cognitive control andbilingualism? Bilingual speakers must develop a powerfulmechanism for keeping the two languages separate, so thatfluency in one language can be achieved without intrusionsfrom the unwanted language.Therefore, the bilingual child’sconstant experience of having two languages available andinhibiting one when the other is activated enhances their abilityto multitask in other domains.There is more good news forbilingual children: it’s been suggested that some of thesecognitive advantages are maintained in old age. If these resultsare confirmed by future research, it will be possible toconclude that bilingualism provides a defence against thedecline of general processing functions that is a feature ofnormal cognitive aging.

A further spin-off of bilingualism is higher awareness oflanguage and greater ability to think about it and talk about it.Bilingual children have a greater ability to focus on the form oflanguage, abstracting away from meaning. Parents of bilingualchildren often report that their children engage in ‘languageplay’ that may take the form of ‘funny accents’ or impossibleliteral translations between one language and another. Manyparents also report that bilingual children have moreprecocious reading skills, and this has recently been confirmedexperimentally. Bilingual children recognize symbolic letter-sound correspondences earlier than monolingual children,although this does not appear to be related to greaterawareness of the sounds themselves and it is also a function ofthe specific languages acquired as well as of the level ofproficiency attained

Because of their experience of selecting languages according tothe perceived linguistic competence of the person they areaddressing, bilingual children have also been said to have anenhanced ‘awareness of the other’.This often goes under theheading of ‘Theory of Mind’, which is a term used to describethe ability to understand other people’s mental states, andmore specifically that other people may have beliefs, desiresand intentions different from one’s own.The cognitive abilitiesinvolved in Theory of Mind normally emerge around the age of

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4 years in monolingual children;they are permanently impaired inautistic children. It has beenreported that bilingual childrendevelop Theory of Mind, onaverage, a year earlier thanmonolingual children It isremarkable that the experience ofdealing with two languages mayhave such extensive repercussionsin so many apparently unrelateddomains of cognitive development.

Do bilingual children confuse theirlanguages? A hopelessly mixedlanguage is the thing that manyparents in bilingual families typicallyfear, but recent research hascompletely discredited this idea.

First, using new techniques for studying whether babies can tellthe difference between one outside stimulus and otherresearchers have learned that monolingual babies’ perceptualabilities are remarkably fine-tuned very early on: they know a lotabout what their language sounds like long before they startproducing their first words, and even at the age of a few monthswill notice when someone who was speaking English switches tospeaking, say, Japanese. This makes it very implausible that bilingualchildren do not realize that they are hearing two languages.Second, research on ‘code-switching’ – swapping back and forthbetween languages – shows that bilingual children, like bilingualadults, often switch from one language to another in order toachieve particular communicative effects. For example, even ifthey are talking in Language A, they may switch to Language B toreport something that somebody said, if the speech they arereporting was originally in Language B. Or they may switchbecause of the topic they are talking about, or simply to playgames with their languages. Naturally, this kind of code-switching

takes place most often when talking to other bilingual children.Moreover, code-switching is not random but generally obeys aremarkably strict grammar. For example, a Spanish-English bilingualchild is much more likely to say ‘La house’ than ‘The casa’ (Spanisharticle + English noun, rather than ‘English article + Spanish noun),apparently favouring the combination that is more informative interms of grammatical features like gender and number. Far fromproducing random mixings due to confusion, in other words,bilingual children know when and how it is appropriate to mixtheir languages.There is also plenty of evidence that thegrammatical rules of each of the languages are kept separate mostof time in the course of development.While bilingual childrenusually are ‘late talkers’ who start speaking later than monolingualchildren, there is little evidence that bilingual languages affect eachother – they neither speed up nor delay normal acquisitionprocesses. Instead, children’s development in each of the twolanguages follows the same milestones as in monolingual children.

Bilingualism Matters aims to raise awareness in schools andcommunities about the facts and benefits of bilingualism, so thatmore and more children have the opportunity to grow up withmore than one language.At the same time, it aims to makeparents aware that raising children with two languages requires acommitment.There is no single ‘method’ that works best and fitsall families: the well-known ‘one parent-one language’ system isnot the only one that could be adopted. But any system shouldensure, first, that children are exposed to enough input in bothlanguages in a variety of situations in which they feel involved andmotivated to participate, and second, that both languages arevalued by the family and the community.

Antonella Scorace is Professor of DevelopmentalLinguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Moreinformation about Bilingualism Matters can be found onthe website at www.bilingualism-matters.org.uk or bywriting to info@bilingualism-matters.org.uk.

families

advantages areparticularlyevident in tasksthat involvecognitiveflexibility and thecontrol ofattention:bilingual childrenseem to bebetter atselectively payingattention

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