When a child is bilingual

Many people talk about the practical benefits that knowledge of languages ​​gives us – but did you know that bilingualism, especially in children, is also very useful for developing creative thinking and attention? For example, such children are better at coming up with unusual uses for familiar objects*. Bilingual children are also better at tasks that require the suppression of “incorrect” information. The fact is that someone who has been bilingual since childhood has to say something every time not only to correctly compose a phrase in one language, but also to “suppress” the influence of another. Such suppression occurs in the areas of the brain responsible for the inhibition and control of attention. These areas of the brain develop later than others, which is why many children behave “without brakes” and hardly switch their attention. And in bilingual children, these zones are more developed due to constant training.

Or another experiment: in front of the child, they built two towers of cubes of different sizes (for example, from large blue and small red ones), and the tower of blue cubes was higher, although there were fewer cubes in it. The child was asked to first count the number of cubes in each of the towers, and then compare them in height. After that, the children were asked which of the towers had more cubes. And bilingual children were more successful than monolingual children in switching from comparing heights to comparing the number of blocks and more often gave the correct answer: in the red tower, even though it was lower.

Until the age of six, children usually “do not see” two possible interpretations of such famous pictures as black profiles facing each other, framing a white vase in the middle. But bilingual children – their peers – cope with this task with greater ease. In addition, bilinguals are much better at separating linguistic forms from the meaning they convey. For example, children were asked to repeat phrases, replacing one word with another and not paying attention to the meaning. For example, the word “we” should be replaced with the word “spaghetti” – how do you say “We are good children”? Bilingual children played this game with ease, while monolingual children often “stumbled” over the meaninglessness of the resulting phrase. Such a seemingly useless skill is very helpful in learning languages. Therefore, it is not surprising that children who speak two languages ​​from childhood have a much easier time with the third and subsequent ones. As we can see, early bilingualism leads to the development of attention and the ability to select the necessary information, contributes to the formation of creative thinking and language abilities. And if your family has the opportunity to raise a bilingual child or to teach him a second language from the first years of life, you should not miss this chance.

* E. Bialystok «Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition» (Cambridge University Press, 2001).