While some have long feared that young children exposed to more than one language would end up having trouble acquiring language, all the recent research clearly tends to prove the opposite. The New York Times takes a look at the subject in this article based on the studies of leading researchers from various North-American universities, all of whom converge to the same results.

Ellen Bialystok, professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies: learning different ways to solve logic problems, handle multitasking, etc. She even claims that “children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function”. A crucial function as it stands for a large number of skills related to anticipation, planning, organization, problem solving, logical reasoning, abstraction, mental flexibility, initiative, etc.

Another scientific, Janet Werker, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, pushes things even further back to life in utero: experiences have shown that even in the womb, babies perceive the rhythms and sounds of language, and depending if they’re exposed to one or more languages, they come to life more or less flexible, linguistically, more or less open. Growing up in a bilingual context, these children develop strategies for their brains to keep the languages separate, and learn them.

The article mentions another interesting study led by researchers at the University of Washington: at 6 months, monolingual infants notice the difference between sounds uttered in the language they were used to hearing, and those in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies can no longer detect the sounds of an unknown language. The researchers interpret this process as a “neural commitment”, in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, bilingual infants do not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language at 6 to 9 months, but when they were older, around 10 to 12 months, they become able to discriminate sounds in both.

Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington concludes: “What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open. (…) They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do.

Full article available here.