Summary of A Bilingual Mind

The article summaries the importance and benefits of being bilingual as it critically compares and contrasts the difference between Bilingual, trilingual or just learning one language. This means that one of its purposes is to justify the vitality of language with a variety of perspectives.


As a human, learning to speak is in our nature and plays an important role in shaping our master identity. However accomplishing developing a variety languages allows scientists to explore the influence on our brain and its connection to the languages with our behaviour and structure of the brain itself. To justify,  the Lycée Français de New York is a great example of where students that are able to speak both English and French including the Cultural Services of the French Embassy allows experts to explore the science and its connection to being able to speak a variety of languages.

The article then continues to mention how we are crude linguists from the moment of earth since we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognise different combinations language sounds. This is evident where a speech therapist with the Ecole International de New York Elisabeth Cros explains how: "Parents will react to the phonemes they recognise from their native tongues, which reinforce the baby's use of this selected ones."Moving forward, being Bilingual is something that children aren't really aware of doing. Studies show that they face the dog-chien dilemma where one encounters an object, action or concept and instantaneously toggles between two different words to describe it. This leads researchers to often point out the famous Physiological "Stroop test" where subjects are asked to read out for example, the word "red" in a different color. Undoubtedly, everyone experiences a slow lag but for bilinguals its measurable shorter. Not to forget a recent study in 2013 that expresses the advantages of being able to speak two languages where bilinguals were faster as well as more metabolically economical in executing the cognitive mission, using less energy in the frontal cortex than the monolinguals. 

Lynch also claims that multilingual children might exhibit social empathy faster than children who grow up learning only one language, which makes developments sense. This means that some studies have proven that a thickening of the cortex in two brain region specially in the left inferior parent establishes come for language and gesturing. Obviously structural difference are evident as the new science is really revealing.


However not every research or study out there finds advantages to bilingualism. This is evident where a psychologist at Concordia University in Montreal studied found that kinds had smaller comprehension vocabularies than kids being raise monolingual. The reasoning to so is because of parents mixing their languages when speaking to their kids which leads to what linguist call cod-switching. Not to forget that Bialystok agrees that this is a short-term disadvantage of bilingualism, and says in most cases the kids catch up therefore when they do, language skills acquired early can pay late-life dividends. In one study, bilinguals experienced the onset of age-related dementia 4.1 years later than monolinguals, and full-blown Alzheimer’s 5.1 years later.

Although multilingualism is not the only path to staying cognitively healthy, it is something many researchers and scientists are conducting valuable time to understand the relation between language and the brain.