The Bilingual Brain

The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual

• Knowing two or more languages means that the brain may look and work differently than those of monolinguals.
• Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading.
• Most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in varying proportions and can be classified into three general types: compound, coordinate, and subordinate bilinguals.
• Recent advances in brain imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain.
• The critical period hypothesis suggests that children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition.
• Learning a language in childhood may give a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts.
• People who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than in their native one.
• Being multilingual gives the brain some remarkable advantages, such as higher density of the grey matter that contains most of the brain's neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language.
• The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimer's and dementia by as much as five years.
• Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed a child's development, a view based largely on flawed studies.
• A recent study showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information.
• Bilingualism does not necessarily make one smarter, but it does make the brain more healthy, complex, and actively engaged. It's never too late to learn a second language and reap the cognitive benefits.