Bilingualism the Subject of Bilgualism and Its

Bilingualism The subject of bilgualism and its impact on cognitive development has always been an in interest of mine. When I first learned Spanish, I went to Mexico. I arrived in a small town, was dropped off by friends and started a six-week intensive course in Spanish and lived with a Mexican family. I did not even know how to say "Buenas Dias." The town I went to was San Miguel De Allende, and it has a large foreign English-speaking community.

This was unfortunate since it meant I had many opportunities to revert to English rather than practicing my new language. I will never forget my struggle to put together my first sentences in Spanish. Learning another language can be a humbling experience. So when I returned to the States, I had great sympathy for non-English speaking children who arrived at first grade and were instructed in English. In effect, these children are expected to simply "sink or swim." This is not the case for every child, however.

Every year, thousands of middle- and upper-class American children study a foreign language for what they believe would be their own enrichment. These children, their parents, and their teachers are guided by the belief that knowing another language "is good for you." At the same time (and sometimes in the same schools), however, thousands of other children -- usually from immigrant and lower-class backgrounds -- are discouraged from and sometimes forbidden to speak their native language.

Their families are told that communication in their native languages will prevent them from mastering English and that raising children with more than one language will "confuse" them, with long-lasting, detrimental effects. With these two contradictory perspective about language and instruction, it is useful to investigate the research on the matter. An increasing amount of research suggests that there are significant linguistic, cognitive, and neurophysiological differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers.

Linguistic differences include the fact that bilingual children tend to develop an earlier understanding of taxonomic relationships than those who remain monolingual. These relationships refer to ideas such as that cars and buses both fall into the category of "vehicles," for example. This understanding is not dependent on vocabulary size, but could be influenced by the structural features of the speaker's language. Bilingual adults are better than monolingual adults at learning new words.

Bilinguals use a variety of word-learning strategies with similar efficiency and are less susceptible to interference from conflicting orthographic information during word-learning. Linguistic input co-activates both languages in bilinguals; when bilinguals hear or read words in one language, partially overlapping linguistic structures in the other language also are activated. In terms of cognitive differences, bilingual people can inhibit irrelevant verbal and nonverbal information with greater ease than those who are monolingual. The inhibitory control ability is also slower to decline with age in bilinguals than in monolinguals.

Even the danger of dementia can be diminished when one is bilingual, with the average age of dementia onset being later in bilingual people than those who are monolingual. Bilingual children also tend.