The Benefits of Bilingualism
By Dr Zafar M. Iqbal
Toxicology-Cancer
Chicago , IL
Melting pot is a much used but an apt metaphor for what America has been over most of its history.
Still, you always find linguistic, cultural and ethnic islands in big urban populations. Among them, the young tend to be more adaptable and more assimilated in the American mainstream -- increasingly freer from their parents’ background.
The world has more bilingual than monolingual people. Bilingualism is far more common in many European and Asian countries than in America where knowledge or fluency in a language other than English is not as necessary for daily life. The US Census Bureau figures show about 18% of Americans speak at home a language different from English, and about 75% of these bilingual Americans speak English “well” or “very well.”
Years ago, people used to believe (and some still do) that exposing young children to more than one language confuses them. In an English-speaking country like the US, for instance, this would create needless barriers for these children acquiring as extensive a vocabulary, knowledge and skills as their English-only monolingual peers, which could create problems in their smooth and competitive assimilation. The Indo-Pak community, much like other bi- or multi-lingual minorities in the US and UK, also faces these concerns.
Nearly 50 years ago, Peal and Lambert (1962) showed that, on a wide variety of tests including non-verbal skills, children in Montreal who spoke French and English out-performed those who only spoke English.
Since then, research in neurobiology of bilingualism has been quite extensive. Studies so far have shown that speaking more than one language, particularly from infancy or early childhood, enhances various aspects of cognitive control in children. This enhanced ability plays an important role in tasks that demand mental ‘juggling’ or gymnastics, linguistic code-switching (the practice of alternating between two languages during a conversation) and multi-tasking. Bilinguals also seem to be better able to concentrate and focus, ignoring distractions. Over the years, we have also learned how the brain organizes tasks involving speech and communication. Clearly, the benefits of bilingualism outweigh any previously suspected drawbacks.
In a recent interview with The Guardian (UK), a Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto, highlighted the advances made in this area.
She found that bilingual children have greater cognitive abilities than those monolingual, and that the bilinguals understand not just the language structure but also the meaning. This ‘meta-linguistic’ knowledge, she says, is also important in literacy and logical/rational thinking. As a test, she asked children, 5-9, whether this sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” Monolingual children responded the statement was absurd, but the bilinguals said the statement, though absurd, was still grammatically correct. Bilinguals always exercise what is known as ‘cognitive executive control system’ that resolves competition between the two languages they speak, which may explain why bilingual children have enhanced cognitive abilities and can focus their attention by ignoring irrelevancies, as they process the information not just linguistically but also mentally and intellectually. These cognitive abilities, Bialystok believes, increase dramatically over the lifespan of the bilinguals, perhaps by some language-induced reconfiguration of brain network.
One of the remarkable findings has been the effect of bilingualism on the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which occurs in 50-80% of the cases of dementia.
Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease that worsens with age. Most patients are 65 and older, but in up to 5% of cases, the disease appears in patients in their 40s and 50s (‘early- or younger-onset’). Initially, Alzheimer’s involves a mild loss of memory that only gets worse with age. When other intellectual abilities get affected, the patients are generally unable to carry on normal conversation and become oblivious to their environment that increasingly limits their normal daily life activity. After the symptoms are noticed/recognized, patients live on for 4 to 20 more years, depending on age at diagnosis and general health status (average, post-diagnosis life-span, 8 years).
Despite considerable research worldwide in finding effective therapies to delay Alzheimer’s onset or prevent it from getting worse, there is no cure yet. Available treatments can temporarily slow down the worsening condition, which can, in turn, improve the quality of life somewhat. It is the 6 th leading cause of death in US.
In her study with 200 Alzheimer’s patients at the Baycrest Geriatric Center, Toronto ( Ont., Canada), Bialystok found that in bilingual patients, the disease appeared about 4 years later than in the monolingual patients. Another group of 200 patients yielded similar results. In yet another study with 75-year old Alzheimer’s patients with similar level of cognitive problems, she found that the damage in the brain’s medial-temporal cortex among the bilinguals was significantly more than in the monolinguals. That is, although the Alzheimer’s in the bilinguals was at a more advanced level than in the monolinguals, both groups were still functioning at the same level. Even though this study was much smaller (20 patients, each group), she thinks that the bilinguals may be able to cope with the disease better. This ‘cognitive reserve’ in the bilingual brain, some scientists believe, may be due to increased flow of blood and oxygen to the brain, which helps keep the nerve connections active, and for longer. It seems clear that learning a new language stimulates mental activity, a helpful exercise, indeed, at any age but more particularly after 40 or 50.
Other scientists have found that in the left hemisphere of the brain that controls most language and communication skills, the gray matter (part of the brain that is rich in nerve cells and fibers) is denser in the bilingual adults than in the monolinguals. This difference was more apparent in people who learned the second language before age 5 and those who became more proficient in that language. This might involve some architectural organization in the brain.
Brain imaging data show that processing of different languages occurs essentially in the same area of the brain. When information in the bilingual brains is being negotiated back and forth between the two languages, the neural activity in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex of the right hemisphere of the bilinguals is significantly higher than that in the monolinguals. In brain scans, neural activity in this area of the bilinguals is much more pronounced and even predictable. This may be the “neurological signature” of bilingualism in these scans.
During the rehabilitation after brain injury in a bilingual, the use of both languages (instead of just one or even the patient’s native language alone) seems to work better in the recovery of the patient’s speech and communication.
A further question may be: Is familiarity and fluency in three languages better than in two? Bialystok thinks not, in the absence of hard evidence. She argues that while bilingualism may be a functional necessity in a country or region in which the lingua franca is different from the language one had spoken early on, learning of additional language/s is generally more of matter of personal choice, a ‘luxury’ or intellectual option, than a basic requirement in daily life.
Some other interesting questions that come to mind: Does learning unrelated languages (Urdu and English; or Chinese and English) have any extra benefit over learning related languages (Italian and Spanish)? Is there any neural (functional and architectural) basis of bilingualism benefits?
Interest in bilingualism has been so great recently that the American Association for the Advancement of Science had in its February, 2011 annual conference a three-hour session entitled ‘Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Are Telling Us About Mind and Brain’, organized by Judith F. Kroll of Pennsylvania State University, with speakers from US, Canada, Germany and Spain.
For further reading:
Bialystok E. Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development. 1999; 70(3), 636-644.
Hernandez AE, Dapretto M, Mazziotta J, Bookheimer S. Language switching and language representation in Spanish-English bilinguals: an fMRI study. NeuroImage. 2001; 14:510-520.
Marrero MZ, Golden CJ, Espe-Pfeifer P. Bilingualism, brain injury, and recovery: implications for understanding the bilingual and for therapy. Clinical Psychology Review. 2002; 22:463-478
Mechelli A, Crinion JT, Noppeney U, O’Doherty J, Ashburner J, Frackowiak RS, Price CJ. Neurolinguistics: structural plasticity in the bilingual brainNature. 2004 Oct 14; 431:757.
Bialystok E, Craik FI, Freedman M. Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia. 2007 Jan 28; 45(2):459-464.
Javier, Rafael Art. The Bilingual Mind: Thinking, Feeling and Speaking in Two Languages (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics), Springer, 2007.
Kovelman I, Baker SA, Petitto LA. Bilingual and monolingual brains compared: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of syntactic processing and a possible “neural signature” of bilingualism. J Cog Neurosci. 2008; 20(1):153-169.
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