Atai Isaev, Portion of My Paper, Week 16

According to Ellen Bialystok, as well as her colleagues, bilinguals have an upper hand on monolinguals in cognitive development. “The need to manage two jointly activated languages apparently leads to an enhancement of frontal posterior attentional control mechanisms with the consequence that other types of cognitive control are also enhanced.” (Bialystok et al, 8). Bialystok et al mention how the common belief that childhood bilingualism had negative effects in developing minds was proven wrong in a study by Peal and Lambert. In said study, they gave tests to French monolinguals and English-French bilingual kids in Montreal. The authors expected to see monolinguals perform better, but found quite the opposite: “ bilingual children were superior on most tests, especially those requiring symbol manipulation and reorganization. This unexpected difference between monolingual and bilingual children was later explored in studies showing a significant advantage for bilingual children in their ability to solve linguistic problems based on understanding such concepts as the difference between form and meaning, that is, metalinguistic awareness  and nonverbal problems that required participants to ignore misleading information” (Bialystok et al, 2).