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Research from Concordia University in Montreal reveals a new perk visible in the problem-solving skills of bilingual toddlers. The study assessed the vocabularies of 39 bilingual children and 43 monolinguals when they were aged 24 months, and then again at 31 months. During the second assessment, the researchers also had the young participants perform a battery of tasks to test their cognitive flexibility and memory skills. While overall, there was little difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers, bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts. Conflict inhibition refers to the mental process of overriding a well-learned rule that you would normally pay attention to. These were the two tasks: 1. Reverse categorization -- participants were told to put a set of little blocks into a little bucket and big blocks into a big bucket. Then the instructions were switched -- big blocks in the little bucket and little blocks in the big bucket. 2. Shape conflict -- participants were shown pictures of different sized fruit and asked to name them. Then a new series of images was shown, with a small fruit embedded inside a large one. Toddlers were asked to point to the little fruit. Crivello, one of the lead researchers, commented that "Language switching underlies the bilingual advantage on conflict tasks. In conflict inhibition, the child has to ignore certain information -- the size of a block relative to a bucket, or the fact that one fruit is inside another. That mirrors the experience of having to switch between languages, using a second language, even though the word from a first language might be more easily accessible."

This study compared the English vocabulary and verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. The monolingual students scored higher than the bilingual students on average. The age a bilingual student came to America was found to be a factor in their fluency.

Prior to the late 1880s, Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, in the southern part of central Oklahoma, yet today, only 65 fluent speakers, all bilingual in Chickasaw and English, remain. The death of Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual Chickasaw speaker, in December 2013 has spurred reflection on the erosion and future of this endangered language.

Americans lean toward speaking English and it shows in our society today. We come off as lazy as we rely on the people from other countries to learn our language so that they can communicate with us. But compared to the rest of the world, are monolingualists a minority ?

Study examined the medical records of 648 Alzheimer's patients in Hyderabad and found that bilinguals developed dementia four to five years later than monolinguals. 

In most countries of immigration, linguistic diversity is by and large ignored by policy makers. If there are language-related policies, they take a deficit view of migrants and their children and focus on improving their English (or whatever the national language may be). Although it may be expensive, schools should promote a bilingual environment rather than promoting only English because it has been proven through research that people who are bilingual tend to succeed financially. As the economy becomes more globally connected than ever, proficient multilingual speakers are needed more than ever.

This article discusses the many benefits of bilingualism / being bilingual. It goes over a research experiment that was conducted to test the way that the mind distinguishes and identifies the difference between languages by having children do classification tests with shape and colors. It also discusses the differences between bilingualism vs monolingualism.

This article is about the many benefits of bilingualism and how bilinguals are smarter than monolinguals.

"We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: "Apples grow on noses." The monolingual children couldn't answer. They'd say, "That's silly" and they'd stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, "It's silly, but it's grammatically correct." The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important."

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

Around the world more than half (around 60 to 75 percent) speak at least two languages. Most countries have more than one official national language. For example south Africa has 11. So being monolingual like most native english speakers are, we are becoming the minority.

Multilingualism serves an extremely practical purpose. Languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups - for trade, travel and so on - it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues. We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who survive today. "If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual," says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. "The rule is that one mustn't marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child - it's taboo. So every single child's mum and dad speak a different language." The article also provides a useful summary of the benefits of speaking at least one other language: bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's. Bilingualism can also delay the onset of dementia and increase cognitive recovery after a stroke. And in addition to social and cultural benefits, bil

In a study, it is predicted that bilinguals have enhanced brain networks because they had a delayed onset of Alzheimer's by five years compared to monolinguals of similar educational backgrounds. Through CT scans, it was discovered that bilinguals physically had twice as much atrophy of the brain as monolinguals at the time symptoms started. This means that bilinguals showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's even though their brains physically looked like they did.

This study looks at how age of acquisition affects second language learning and how it can influence cognitive processing. Bilingual Spanish and English speakers appear to have an advantage over monolingual individuals, with bilingualism shaping word learning and memory capacity. Specifically, early bilinguals performed better than monolingual individuals and late bilingual learners. There were two mechanisms discussed at the end of the study. The first is based on the critical-period-based phenomenon. The second is based on longer exposure to the two languages, which contributes to bilingual advantages.

This study shows that bilingualism can delay the onset of symptoms of dementia by about 4-5 years compared with monolinguals. They still get the disease, but they're able to cope longer than monolinguals once they get it.

An interesting scholarly sociolinguistic paper! Jane H. Hill, a University of Arizona linguist, examines the use of mock Spanish phrases In the southwestern United States. Hill wondered why English speakers of ``Anglo" ethnic affiliation make considerable use of Spanish in casual speech, in spite of the fact that the great majority of them are utterly monolingual in English under most definitions. However, these monolinguals both produce Spanish and consume it, especially in the form of Mock Spanish humor, and that use of Mock Spanish intensified during precisely the same period when opposition to the use of Spanish native speakers has grown, reaching its peak in the passage of ``Official English'' statutes in several states during the last decade. Hill argues that the use of Mock Spanish is, in fact, racist discourse.

This article talks about the complexities of language in dementia patients, specifically the fact that they are most likely to revert to their primary language as their condition progresses. The study that was done for this article also expands on the possibility that speaking two or more languages can delay the onset of dementia for an average of five years.

I chose this article because prior to posting this I was studying my SAT vocab. I was wondering if this would really help me. I found that "increased vocabulary knowledge correlates with increased grey matter density in a region of the parietal cortex that is well-located to mediate an association between meaning and sound (the posterior supramarginal gyrus). Further this region also shows sensitivity to acquiring a second language. Relative to monolingual English speakers, Italian-English bilinguals show increased grey matter density in the same region."

Studies have proven that bilinguals are better at ignoring unnecessary words in a sentence. Since bilingual people are constantly sorting through one language and the other and picking which one to use and which one to ignore their brain is stimulated more than monolingual people. The monologuists' brains light up more than the bilinguals' brain in an fMRI scan. Researches said that this ment that the monologuists' brain had to work harder to do the same thing as the bilinguals.

Studies show that bilinguals are "smarter" than monolinguals as it improves cognitive skills. Because bilinguals have to switch languages often, it requires one to monitor the environment which constantly keeps the brain active. 

The largest study so far to ask whether speaking two languages might delay the onset of dementia symptoms in bilingual patients as compared to monolingual patients has reported a robust result. Bilingual patients suffer dementia onset an average of 4.5 years later than those who speak only a single language.