Bilingual people show increased activation in the brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition.
Being bilingual can improve a person's multitasking skills, attention control, problem solving and creativity as it promotes outside-the-box thinking. It can also help improve your memory – handy when shopping and remembering people's names!
“When your brain processes language, it's not one place in the brain that processes language,” Marian says. “It's a network that's spread across all areas of the brain.” Because of that, bilingual brains have more pathways connecting different words, concepts and memories across different languages.
Cognitive reserve (CR) prevents cognitive decline and delays neurodegeneration. Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that lifelong bilingualism may act as CR delaying the onset of dementia by ∼4.5 y.
The bilingual brain is used to handling two languages at the same time. This develops skills for functions such as inhibition (a cognitive mechanism that discards irrelevant stimuli), switching attention, and working memory.
Bilingual students concentrate better, ignoring distractions more effectively than those who only speak one language. “Because the language centers in the brain are so flexible, learning a second language can develop new areas of your mind and strengthen your brain's natural ability to focus."
In the early nineteen fifties, researchers found that people scored lower on intelligence tests if they spoke more than one language. Research in the sixties found the opposite. Bilingual people scored higher than monolinguals, people who speak only one language.
Bilingual experience makes gray matter denser, so you have more cells. This is an indication of a healthier brain. Results from a study measuring gray-matter volumes in monolingual or bilingual undergraduates. Red areas indicate where gray-matter volumes were greater in one group versus the other.
More Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual
[9] These skills alone can lead to both academic and behavioral gains as well as a stronger learning environment in your classroom. In a nutshell, advantages of being bilingual include heightened: Executive thinking skills. Working memories and attention spans.
Research has shown that bilingual kids are constantly switching between two languages in their brain, which increases “cognitive flexibility,” the ability to switch between thinking about different concepts or multiple concepts at once, and “selective attention abilities,” the mental process of focusing on one task or ...
One of the most important ways in which being bilingual develops your personality is by exposing you to different ideas. By listening to the ideas of others, you would have the opportunity to develop your own thinking and how you look at the world. This can be beneficial in many ways.
More generally, learning a new language improves brain function, providing better memory, more mental flexibility and creativity, and can even delay the onset of dementia.
The findings suggest that the bilingual experience improves the brain's command center, thus allowing it to solve problems, plan, and execute other mentally demanding tasks.
This suggests the bilingual experience improves the brain's command center, thus giving it the ability to plan, solve problems and perform other mentally demanding tasks.
The main reason suggested for bilinguals' advantage is their need to process and manage the two languages, which are simultaneously activated whenever one of the languages is used [8,9,10,11]. This simultaneous activation requires a higher working memory (WM) capacity.
Bilingual children have a better 'working memory' than monolingual children. Summary: Bilingual children develop a better working memory –- which holds, processes and updates information over short periods of time -– than monolingual children, according to new research.
A person who knows two or more languages has a brain that looks, and works differently than the brain of a mono-lingual person. Compound Bilingual, Coordinate Bilingual, and subordinate bilinguals may all become fully proficient in a language.
It seems that bilingual brains are multitasking all the time—even when they're speaking one language, they're constantly summoning vocabulary from both and choosing which to use. That constant practice helps keep brains nimble and allows bilingual people to juggle tasks more easily.
Bilingualism can make you more creative.
But research shows that language learning can increase creativity in other ways too. Having a richer vocabulary helps us understand the world in unexpected ways and look at problems from fresh perspectives.
Brains of bilingual kids are different to other children. Research on the brain shows that the brain of a child who speaks a second language has cognitive enhancements. In fact in one study, brain scans showed that people who spoke only one language had to work harder to focus on a single word.
For example, relative to a bilingual, a trilingual has to remember even more words and has to inhibit even more languages. To adapt to this increase in cognitive demands, trilinguals may develop a larger cognitive supply (i.e., greater advantages) than bilinguals.