Cognitive Implications Of Bilingualism

By the emerge of globalization, being a bilingual is no longer a novelty experience any more. It is quiet normal in nowadays that people encounter bilinguals in their daily bases. There is a common sense that bilinguals should have certain abilities prior to monolinguals. Bialystok (2001) suggested that “the constant managing 2 competing languages enhance the executive function”. Moreover, her another study(Bialystok, 2004) indicated that bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. These two findings imply that bilingualism have beneficial effects on the executive function and working memory.

Marian and Shook (2012) described how research has shown that a fluent bilingual or multilingual person has greater executive brain function. This has been shown using fMRI technology. The authors provide evidence that the increased executive function is related to the necessity of the bilingual individual to control which language the brain focuses on. The attention and inhibition areas of the brain are activated to perform this process. With greater executive function, bilinguals perform better on conflict management tasks, such as those presented in Stroop Task.

Valian believes that while bilingualism is only one of the factors that may boost cognitive functioning and that data from children and young adults are currently inconclusive, a bilingual advantage seems to be present among older people. Indeed, as Valian (2014a) suggests, studying younger individuals is difficult per se because they are exposed to so many other activities that may enhance executive function. There are currently very few studies on bilingualism in the aging

Since the early 20th century numerous studies, in psychology as well as linguistics, have been conducted on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive abilities (Saer, 1923; Smith, 1923; Gowan & Torrance, 1965). Until the 1960s there was some consensus among experts about the detrimental effect of bilingualism on cognitive development. However, after the publication of Peal and Lambert’s article on the relation of bilingualism to intelligence, most of these theories were discredited due to methodological flaws (Peal & Lambert, 1962). A majority of the studies conducted before this period did not take into consideration the differences in age, gender, culture, second language proficiency and socio-economic status between the monolingual and bilingual participants. Research conducted thereafter has found largely positive effects of bilingualism on cognitive functions (Landry, 1974; Holtzman, 1980). Recent research in the field has focused on understanding the relationship between bilingualism and specific aspects of cognition, such as inhibitory control, creativity and metalinguistic awareness, as opposed to the earlier studies which tried to associate bilingualism with intelligence. Even though, most studies have found a positive correlation between bilingual proficiency and cognitive benefits, there is still much debate in this area of research (Leikin, 2012). In 1992, Ricciardelli

In this Essay is will talk about what it means to me about “being True”. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.” - Self Reliance - Emerson This quote from Self Reliance i think means that you have to believe in yourself and don't listen to other people’s judgement. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Walden.

Bilingualism is similar to juggling and playing video games in which it is intense and can be sustained over a long period of time like driving taxis. However, individuals who are bilingual were forced to be bilingual because of life circumstances and not because of interest. Studies have shown that the effect of bilingual education on cognition is mainly through the executive control. Bilingual individuals have an enhanced executive control and it can be seen throughout their life. Studies on this executive control has shown that bilingual individuals outperform the monolingual individuals. Behavioral studies and imaging studies have found that bilingual individuals have both languages active at all times.

Bilingualism is becoming more and more common as countries like the United States and Canada attract large amounts of immigration. In the 2011 Census, it indicated that 21% of the U.S. population aged 5 and over were speaking a language other than English. Our brain is constantly reorganizing itself as we experience stimuli from our environment, one may also expect neural plasticity when exposed to variations in language. To obtain a more in depth look at how the cognitive process language can affect the structure of our brain, this paper will address the research question: To what extent does bilingualism affect brain structure.

She showed in 2011 that amid the victims of Alzheimer, Bilingual people had on average an onset of the disease 4 years later than monolinguals. The biggest part of her research lied on the comparison between performances of unilinguals and bilinguals on determined errands. She found out that bilinguals had a much later arrival of dementia symptoms and were globally in a better mental health than others when growing old. But even after many inspects, the nature of the process explaining these results remained blurry and unclear. In a report she conducted in .

1). Despite the dictionary definition, the definition of bilingualism was identified as ambiguous and lacked an operational definition (Baker, 2001; Cummins, 1976; Macnamara, 1967). Consequently, defining who is or is not bilingual remained disputable between linguists and researchers. However, several hypotheses were proposed.

Even though one can deviate from the main language spoken, bilingualism does improve brain functioning, because your brain has to work harder to understand two languages simultaneously. This keeps the mind fresh, it requires the ability to switch from one language to another without losing detail of what topic is being spoken about, and it forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, which in turn works out the brain and strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilingualism can also receive cognitive benefit. There are researches have shown that bilingualism is associated with cognitive advantages (Bialystok, 2007; Kovacs & Mehler, 2009). Bilingual children are more advance to meta-linguistic awareness, which is the ability to understand the structure and nature of language (Peterson, 2015). Studies have revealed that expose in bilingual environment and hearing a language from multiple speakers are beneficial

A growing body of research supports the idea that speaking multiple languages results in several benefits. Bilingualism has been shown to enhance mental flexibility, generally understood as “the

Bialystok, Craik, and Luk (2012) investigated the growing body of evidence examining the presence of a bilingual advantage in terms of enhanced executive control: the group of cognitive skills involved in language switching, working memory and inhibition. Furthermore, the researchers examined evidence supporting the notion that differences in brain structure and function helped to explain the bilingual advantage (Bialystok et al., 2012). In regards to joint activation in bilinguals, researchers found that both languages are always activated to some degree (Bialystok et al., 2012) Though this may cause language interference errors, bilinguals can select their target language with remarkable accuracy (Bialystok et al., 2012).

The term ‘bilingualism’ is generally defined as an individual’s ability to use two languages (ASHA, 2004; European

Bilingualism can be defined as speaking and understanding two languages (MacLeod, Fabiano-Smith, Boegner-Pagé & Fontolliet, 2012). The main empirical finding for the effect of bilingualism on cognition is in the evidence for enhanced executive control in bilingual speakers (Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009). Executive functions encompass cognitive processes involved in control and management, such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, task