Palme School is on the phone! We've compiled some research about bilinguals and got some curious facts about bilinguals' speech development and more.
Take your mind off work and household tasks, it's going to be interesting!
- The reading time is 7 minutes.
Are bilinguals smarter than monolinguals?
Bilinguals have a clear linguistic advantage: traveling to distant countries, more job offers with multiple languages, communicating with family members from different regions, preserving traditions and family rituals, friendships and connections with people from different countries. But what else?
Conclusion 1. Bilingual children have more developed empathy. Some studies ( Bialystok & Senman, 2004 ; Goetz, 2003 ; Kovács, 2009 ) confirm that bilingual preschoolers understand other people's points of view, thoughts, and intentions faster than monolinguals. They are also more sensitive to changes in tone of voice.
Conclusion 2. Bilinguals are more multitaskers. A 2012 study ( Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012 ) that bilingual children switch attention faster than monolingual children. Interestingly, a 2005 study (Schellenberg, 2005 ) indicated the same cognitive skills in children with early music education.
Conclusion 3. Synchronous bilinguals (those who have learned two languages simultaneously) retain a better accent, a more varied vocabulary, and high real-time language processing speed. ( Hoff et al., 2012 ; Pearson & Fernández, 1994 )
Conclusion 4. Bilinguals are a little more attentive than monolinguals. In one 2021 study (Chung-Fat-Yim et al, 2021. ; **Grundy and Chung-Fat-Yim*) Researchers have noticed that bilingual both adults and children switch attention to new facts more quickly and see the difference between new and old data.**
Who has more language ability: boys or girls?
Spoiler: the same.
We turned to research on gender differences in the human brain
(You can read it here (PDF) Gender Differences in Human Brain: A Review) and we found this:
Conclusion 5. Visually, the brains of men and women are not different, but they work differently.
Conclusion 6. The part of the brain that is responsible for speech is bulkier in women than in men.
Conclusion 7. If you ask a boy and a girl to say new words, the boy's brain engages only one hemisphere and the girl's brain engages both hemispheres, but the speed will be the same.
Conclusion 8. Boys just pick up and build vocabulary, while girls do it through tethering to emotion and cultural context, but at the same rate.
Conclusion 9. Boys can concentrate for long periods of time on graphs, illustrations, mechanical actions, and shut down during a long monologue.
In a nutshell.
Boys and girls perceive and process information differently.
But if the teacher takes into account the characteristics of each gender, neither gender is favored or considered smarter, stronger, or more intelligent.
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