http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
The New York Times, Sunday Reviews, The Opinion Pages
Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits
in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun
to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than
being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns
out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving
cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in
old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding
of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and
policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference,
cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual
development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that
in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using
only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the
other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a
handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal
conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at
solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual
and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares
presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue
square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing
blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin
marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next,
the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it
required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The
bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the
bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command
system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving
problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes
include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully
from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a
sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems
improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the
bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this
suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore
distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be
inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than
monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a
line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic:
a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch
languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your
mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra
in Spain .
“It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we
monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian
bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his
colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but
they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in
monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to
old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who
learn a second language later in life).
In a 2009 study led
by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste , Italy ,
7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers
raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were
presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen.
Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation
of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on
the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment
quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while
the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent
study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the
neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego,
found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through
a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant
than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease:
the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined
that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep
imprint?
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Well done, Regine.
回覆刪除The recording is excellent!
Thanks a lot to both of you.
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回覆刪除Regine