Bilingualism and Cognitive Advantages

1. Bilingualism has been shown to foster classification skills, concept formation, analogical reasoning, visual-spatial skills, creativity, and other cognitive gains. The following example demonstrates how the knowledge of two words—one in English and one in Welsh—for a single object (a school) could enhance one's concept of 'school':

   ...in Welsh, the word 'ysgol' not only means a school but also a ladder. Thus having the word 'ysgol' in Welsh and 'school' in English provides the bilingual with an added dimension—the idea of the school as a ladder.

2. Bilingual children have also demonstrated superior story-telling skills, perhaps because they are, as Baker suggests, "less bound by words, more elastic in thinking due to owning two languages."
3. And in a study comparing monolinguals and bilinguals (four to six years of age), Ianco-Worall found that bilinguals were two to three years ahead of their monolingual peers in semantic development (Baker 1993).

4. In their book In Other Words, Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta describe the knowledge of two languages as greater than the sum of its parts:

   ...knowing two languages is much more than simply knowing two ways of speaking....it seems evident that the mind of a speaker who has in some way attached two sets of linguistic details to a conceptual representation, whether in a unified or discretely arranged system, has entertained possibilities that the monolingual speaker has had no need to entertain. The enriching aspect of bilingualism may follow directly from its most maddening complication: it is precisely because the structures and concepts of different languages never coincide that the experience of learning a second language is so spectacular in its effects. Academic growth in a student's first language is linked to second-language academic success. Given this connection, and the cognitive advantages of balanced bilingualism discussed in this piece, including increased metalinguistic awareness, it is clear that the knowledge of two languages has the potential to be much greater than the sum of its parts visit brainconnection for more details