Bilingualism and the Advantages of Multilingual Capability Research Paper

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Bilingualism

The concept of bilingualism is common across the globe in the contemporary society for instance in Europe 56% are known to speak in a language other than their mother tongue. This trend is seen to both facilitate cross cultural communication and enhancing cognitive abilities of individuals. Those that are bilingual are known to be better in attention and task switching than those who are monolingual due to the capability to inhibit one language while using another. Children under the age of seven who are bilingual are also known to be better at coping with the environmental changes than the monolingual children.

Language is the essential tool that we use to understand the world around us and to communicate our feelings and thoughts. It is also the tool we use to connect cross-culturally. Though the US is widely known to be monolingual, one fifth of over five years population are known to be multilingual. 66% of the world’s children are estimated to be raised bilingual.

Bilingualism and cognition

Research indicates that when a bilingual uses one language, the other language is also active. Hearing a word comes in sequence not whole word at once, hence the brain system will start guessing what the word is even before the entire word is said hence activating many words in both the languages, this is referred to as language co-activation. It is however concluded that this linguistic competition can cause difficulty in language, for instance naming pictures slowly and instances where the speaker is unable to conjure the word but can recall all the details about the word. Constant switching between two languages can also confuse the listener if they do not properly understand both languages.

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From such challenges, in order for the brain to maintain balance between two languages, there is need to have general cognitive abilities which include the process of attention and inhibition. The language system of a bilingual individual are always active and competing, hence the individual uses the inhibition and attention every time he speaks or listens.

Bilinguals often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. The ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input is called inhibitory control. Bilingual people often perform better than monolingual people at tasks that tap into inhibitory control ability. This means the bilinguals are can be better in handling tasks that tap into the inhibitory control than the monolinguals. The bilinguals are also known to be better in switching between two tasks than the monolinguals. It appears that bilingual experience not only changes the way neurological structures process information, but also may alter the neurological structures themselves.

There are practical benefits in being bilingual. One of them is that the improvement in cognitive and sensory processing triggered by bilingualism can help this individual better process information in the environment which leads to a clearer signal for learning. Such kind of improved attention can explain why a bilingual can learn a third language faster than a monolingual would learn….....

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