The Benefits of Being Bilingual
A
AMost people alive today, the newest counts suggest, speak two or more languages, raised with them from childhood rather than with just one. There was a time when such a child was thought worse off than a classmate brought up with a single language. That view has been overturned in recent decades: as scientists' tools have grown more powerful, it has become possible to trace in far greater detail how speaking more than one language reshapes brain and mind, and doing so has revealed a number of unmistakable advantages.
B
BWhenever someone who speaks two languages uses one of them, studies find, the second does not switch off but stays live in the background. Consider how hearing works: a word reaches us not in a single instant but as a string of sounds unfolding bit by bit, and the mind's language machinery starts betting on the word's identity well before the last sound has landed. Hear the fragment 'can', and 'candy' and 'candle' are likely to stir alongside it, at least while recognition is still under way. In a bilingual listener, that stirring respects no boundary between the two tongues, an incoming sound waking matching words in whichever language they sit. The strongest support for this effect, which specialists label parallel activation, comes from tracking bilinguals' gaze patterns. Tell a German-English speaker to 'pick up the rock' from an array of items and, unlike a listener with no German, they will let their eyes drift towards a skirt, since Rock, the German for 'skirt', echoes the English word just heard. The pull arises because the sound reaching the ear fits a word in either language equally well.
C
CThis never-ending rivalry between a person's languages does, it must be said, carry a cost. Naming a picture, for one thing, tends to take a bilingual speaker a fraction longer, and the maddening 'tip-of-the-tongue' sensation, the word hovering just out of reach, crops up more often. Because the two languages must be kept in balance moment by moment, a speaker has to regulate how far each one is allowed to surface at any instant. This seems to leave bilinguals sharper on jobs that demand inhibitory control. Take the well-known flanker task: a row of arrows flashes up and the participant must call out which way the middle one points. Where the arrows on either side aim the same way as the target, the answer comes faster than where they aim the opposite way, the neighbours pulling against the central arrow. At challenges of this sort, the knack of brushing aside distracting signals to fix on what matters, bilinguals frequently shine. They also change tack between two jobs more nimbly: asked to stop sorting shapes by colour and start sorting them by form, they make the shift faster than someone with only one language, a sign of stronger cognitive flexibility whenever strategy must be rewritten on the fly.
D
DThe bilingual edge, it appears, is not confined to thinking; its neurological reach stretches into regions the brain devotes to making sense of what the senses take in. Play a plain speech sound to teenagers in a quiet room and those with one language and those with two register it almost identically, deep in the brain stem. Add background hubbub, though, and the picture changes: now the bilingual brain answers far more strongly, locking on to the sound's fundamental frequency, the property our ears read as pitch, with markedly greater fidelity.
E
EGains of this kind may sharpen how a bilingual person takes in the surrounding world, and they may also explain a curious fact: adults who already speak two languages pick up a third more readily than one-language adults manage a second. At the root of it, perhaps, lies a talent for keeping attention on the new language while holding at bay the interference thrown up by those already known.
F
FGrowing old is where another finding comes in. Speaking two languages, research suggests, may keep the mind's machinery in good order, since the brain can press alternative networks into service to make up for circuits age has worn down. Memory holds up better in elderly bilinguals than in one-language contemporaries, with a tangible payoff for health. When more than 180 people with Alzheimer's disease, a condition that steadily destroys brain tissue, were followed, those who spoke two languages had noticed the tell-tale early symptoms close to four years later than those who spoke only one. A later phase matched bilingual and monolingual sufferers for how far their symptoms had advanced; startlingly, the bilingual brains bore heavier physical traces of the illness, yet the two groups acted and coped no differently. Picture the brain as an engine, and bilingualism lets it travel farther on the same tank.
G
GWhat is more, the head start seems to arrive remarkably soon. In one experiment, babies of six months, some from one-language and some from two-language homes, were trained to expect a puppet on one side of a screen whenever a soft chiming noise played. Midway through, the rule was quietly reversed and the puppet began appearing on the other side. To keep earning their reward the infants had to abandon what they had learned and grasp the new arrangement, and only those from bilingual homes managed it. The lesson seems to be that, for the youngest as much as the oldest, moving through a world of several languages hands out benefits reaching well past language itself.
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Question 1 - 5
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Method used | What researchers found |
Recording the 1. of German-English speakers as they were asked to pick out particular items | A bilingual's two languages are switched on together, an effect researchers call 2. |
An exercise known as the 3. , in which people report which way a central arrow points | When rival cues must be filtered out, bilinguals cope better, drawing on what is termed 4. |
An exercise in which people repeatedly shift from sorting by one feature to sorting by another | As they rewrite their approach, bilinguals display greater 5. |