Does bilingualism make you smarter? - Domenico Maceri

Dequwan Well, a first-grader in a dual-language school in San Bernardino, Calif., said that he “can have more friends” because he can speak two languages. Dequwan is even smarter than he realizes. Researchers have discovered that being bilingual may make children “smarter” than monolingual ones.

Laura-Ann Petitto, a researcher at Dartmouth College, stated that “bilingual children can perform certain cognitive tasks more accurately than monolinguals.” Petitto and several colleagues compared a group of monolingual children who spoke only French or English to a group of children who were learning one spoken language with one signed language. The children in the two groups were matched in terms of age (4 to 6) but in memory development as well.

The researchers determined that bilingual children far outperformed the monolingual group in determining whether rapidly-changing computer-generated red and blue squares appear on the center, right, or left side of the screen.

Traditionally, the idea was that bilingual children’s language development was slower because of having to deal with the confusion of two languages. Petitto says that the heightened cognitive skills of bilingual children have to do with the increased computational demands of having to process two different languages.

The advantages of bilingualism affect the entire education of students. Students educated in more than one language develop a mental agility that monolinguals lack. One of these advantages has to do with something researchers call a “plasticity” of the brain.

Bilingual children recognize that just as there are two ways to say something, there are also two ways to learn and solve problems. This mental agility is evident in learning foreign languages. Just as it’s easier for someone who knows how to play a musical instrument to learn a second and a third one, thus it is also easier for someone who knows a second language to learn a third, or even a fourth one...