Bilingualism and Today’s World: Advantages in Life

What is the Situation Today?

Nowadays in so many parts of the world people are able to speak more than one language. It is because increased social mobility and globalization created a demand for bilingualism not only as a means of communication but more importantly as a new field in experimental research. Researchers are primarily concerned with defining bilingualism, its role and effects on teaching and learning.

What is the Definition of Bilingualism?

In literature, bilingualism has been perceived from linguistic, cognitive and even socio-cultural perspectives. In the early days, bilingualism was widely understood as the native-like control of two languages and bilinguals were referred to as people who spoke two languages on the level of a native speaker. With this definition, bilinguals were expected to speak two languages ‘perfectly’. In sharp contrast, others defined a bilingual as anyone who possessed a minimal competence in a language other than the mother tongue. Since then, other definitions have emerged that can be placed between the two existing definitions of absolute native-like proficiency and minimal proficiency in two languages.

Are There Any Positive Effects?

When assessing cognitive complexity in bilingual and monolingual children, researchers found that bilingual subjects were more advanced than monolingual subjects in tasks challenging their executive control or otherwise known as attention control. Based on their studies, they suggested that early childhood bilingualism modifies the development of attentional control and provides children with an advantage in problem-solving and inhibition of irrelevant information.

Other researchers found that bilingualism aids in the development of larger working memory capacity. This capacity is believed to represent greater ability to control attention within the working memory store. Indeed, in experiments bilingual children responded faster than monolinguals. Moreover, they were more accurate than monolinguals in responding to incongruent trials, confirming an advantage in aspects of executive functioning. It is also worth mentioning that previous studies examined medical records of individuals who developed Alzheimer’s disease. They determined that 184 individuals who had used two languages throughout their lives tended to be diagnosed with dementia 4 years later than those who had only used one language.

Are There Any Negative Effects?

Scholars report a number of negative effects or ‘cognitive costs of bilingualism’ as they are also called. These effects extend into several areas. In the area of receptive vocabulary monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in tasks that assessed the knowledge of vocabulary only one language. Researchers believe that this is due to the fact that monolinguals had more time (frequency) and experience than bilinguals on retrieving words in one language.

Lexical retrieval is another field where not only positive but also negative effects could be seen. The results suggested that monolinguals are better than bilinguals in lexical retrieval and in tasks that required rapid generation of words. Such a difference is believed to be due to bilinguals suppressing possible interferences from the other unwanted but still active language, particularly when they are time pressured.

Is Bilingualism a Positive or a Negative Phenomenon?

There is no definitive answer. Some studies have reported negative effects of bilingualism in areas like lexical access and receptive vocabulary, however, overall, the results indicate that bilingualism is positively associated with a range of cognitive benefits that allow bilinguals to develop skills that extend into other domains.

References

Asbjørnsen, Maria F. 2013. Bilingualism: The situation in Norway. NTNU – Trondheim. 5-35

Ng, Elaine. 2015. Bilingualism, biliteracy and cognitive effects: A review paper. TESOL, vol. 10, 93 – 124.

Adesope, Olusola O., Tracy Lavin, Terri Thompson and Charles Ungerleider 2010. A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Cognitive Correlates of Bilingualism. Review of Educational Research, 80: 2, 207–245.