It used to be thought that being bilingual was a bad thing—that it would confuse or
hold people back, especially children. Turns out we couldn't have been more wrong.
Learning new languages is an exercise of the mind; it's the mental equivalent of going
to a gym every day.
In the bilingual brain, all our languages are active all at the same time. The continuous
effort of suppressing a language when speaking another, along with the mental
challenge that comes with regularly switching between languages, exercises our brain.
It improves our concentration, problem solving, memory, and in turn, our creativity.
It's now widely accepted that there are huge benefits to being bilingual. A key
breakthrough came back in 2007 in Toronto, when Ellen Bialystok and her team made
a discovery that shook the scientific community and has massive real-world
implications. It was the first study which suggested that bilingual people—people who
speak more than one language—develop dementia 4 to 4.5 years later than those who
don't. It was a powerful confirmation of the idea of cognitive reserve.
Now, what is cognitive reserve? Cognitive reserve is the idea that people develop a
reserve of thinking abilities, and this protects them against losses that can occur
through aging and disease, as well as delaying the onset of dementia. Bilingual people
have been shown to recover significantly better after a stroke. Learning anything new
helps build cognitive reserve, but there's something special about language. Language
is particularly broad and complex: it affects ideas and concepts, perception, different
sounds. The more complex a certain skill is, the more likely it is to have a positive
effect on cognitive reserve.
So, when is the best time to learn a new language? Well, here's part of the answer: the
brain is a complex set of networks. When you're learning a new language as a child,
you're building new networks. But when you learn a language later in life, you have to
modify the existing networks and make more connections. Because learning
languages later in life can be more challenging, the benefits can also be greater.
But a 2023 study at Great Ormond Street suggests this is just part of the story. So we
invited three groups of children that were aged 8 to 10:
We had a group of children who were monolingual,
A group of children who had early exposure to Greek and English from birth
(they were our early bilinguals),
And finally, we had a group who had been exposed to English between the ages
of 2 and 5 (they were our later bilinguals).
So what we did that no one had done before is that we asked the children to lie in the
scanner while doing nothing and just staring at a cross, and during this, we measured
their brain activity. What we found that was really exciting for us is that our early
bilingual group had the strongest connectivity in a network at rest—these group of
regions are regions that light up when we're doing nothing and just mind-wandering.
A little bit like if you're going to the gym every day your muscles might look bigger at
rest, similarly your brain might be better connected at rest because you are learning a
language early, and this is something no one had found before.
And there's more. One lesser-known behavioral effect of bilingualism in both children
and adults is the ability to see other people's perspective, or to understand that it is
possible to have different points of view. Recent studies have also found that people
tend to react more emotionally in their first language, and more rationally or in a more
abstract way in their second. The way it is usually explained is that the first language
is the one which we use to speak with family, with friends, and in informal settings;
the second language is usually learned at school, at university, or at work.
Scientists are discovering new upsides to being bilingual all the time, and it's not just
our brains that benefit. Learning new languages and speaking more than one language
is very important not only for individuals, but also for societies. Learning new
languages can open doors to new cultural experiences, life opportunities, different
people, different communities, and different ways of seeing the world.
And with that, we'll say a final goodbye. Bye!