Brain Power by Catherine de Lange

Brain Power by Catherine de Lange

Author:Catherine de Lange
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael O'Mara


CHAPTER 18

The bilingual brain boost

I was brought up in a bilingual household, speaking French and English, and I have always been keen to do the same for my own children. The benefits of speaking more than one language are huge, not least for the cultural aspects and the connection they can forge with other people and countries. But it is also interesting from a neurological perspective.

The idea that speaking two or even more languages is a good thing for the mind is a relatively recent one that has emerged over the last few decades. In England and many other Western countries it was thought that raising infants to be bilingual would delay their language learning and could even lead to cognitive impairments. This idea stemmed from studies in the first half of the twentieth century that found people who spoke several languages did worse on verbal tests, which were seen as a measure of cognitive ability. As one researcher famously wrote in a paper in 1929: ‘bilingualism in young children is a hardship and devoid of apparent advantage’.150

These studies had a huge impact, but they were limited because they didn’t account for lots of other important factors such as age, the socioeconomic status of families and whether a child’s schooling was interrupted – something that would have been particularly relevant to immigrants and refugees. Crucially, too, the studies didn’t look at proficiency in the language in which the test was administered, so poor test results were being attributed to bilingualism when it could simply have been because someone didn’t understand the question.

Then, in the 1960s, Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert at McGill University in Canada conducted the first study that took these factors into account. Their important paper showed that being bilingual didn’t cause developmental problems at all. On the contrary, bilingual children in their study outperformed monolinguals in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests.151

Even so, it took decades for this new way of thinking to take off. However, in the last ten years or so, in part because of new scanning technologies, and also thanks to a growing understanding that our brains can physically change in response to our environment, attention has once again turned to the effects of language on the brain, and its potential to elevate the thinking mind.



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