The unexpected benefits of being bilingual - study

Since Israel has many Jewish immigrants and Israeli Arabs are better off conversing in Hebrew as well, this country has many bilingual or even trilingual residents.

It’s sometimes confusing, but researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have found that people who speak two languages may be better at ignoring irrelevant information and shifting their attention from one thing to another compared to those who speak only one. 

Linguistics doctoral candidate Grace deMeurisse and Prof. Edith Kaan have just published their study in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition under the title “Bilingual attentional control: Evidence from the Partial Repetition Cost Paradigm.”

They investigated the differences between bilingual and monolingual individuals when it comes to attentional control and ignoring information that isn’t important at the time.  

The benefits of being bilingual

“Our results showed that bilinguals seem to be more efficient at ignoring information that's irrelevant, rather than suppressing or inhibiting information,” deMeurisse said. “One explanation for this is that bilinguals are constantly switching between two languages and need to shift their attention away from the language not in use.” 

For example, if an English- and Spanish-speaking person is having a conversation in Spanish, both languages are active, but English is put on hold but always ready to be deployed as needed.  

Numerous studies have examined the distinctions between the two groups in broad cognitive mechanisms, which are mental processes that our brains use, like memory, attention, problem-solving, and decision-making, deMeurisse said. “The effects of speaking two languages on a person’s cognitive control is often debated. Some of the literature says these differences aren’t so pronounced, but that could be because of the tasks linguists use to research differences between bilinguals and monolinguals.”  

DeMeurisse and Kaan set out to see if differences between the two groups would surface. They used an exercise called the Partial Repetition Cost task which has not been applied in psycholinguistics before – to measure the participants’ abilities to deal with incoming information and control their attention

The two groups of subjects included functional monolinguals and bilinguals. Functional monolinguals – those who had two years or less of foreign language experience in a classroom and use only the first language that they learned as a child – and bilinguals who had learned both their first and second language before the ages of nine to 12 and were still using both languages.   

Kaan explained that an individual’s cognitive traits continuously adapt to external factors, and as humans, we have very few traits that remain fixed throughout our lifetime. “Our cognition is continuously adapting to the situation, so in this case, it's adapting to being bilingual,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it won’t change, so if you stop using the second language, your cognition may change as well,” she continued.  

Research results

The UF study proves that there is a need to build more consistency among the varied experiments used to understand differences between those who speak one language and those who speak more than one.

“In the study of bilingualism and cognition, we are redefining the way we talk about differences between bilinguals and monolinguals and searching for more factors to consider and more methods to conduct that research,” deMeurisse said.  

The researchers were also clear to point out that their study was not intended to show that people who speak two or more languages have an advantage over those who speak one.

“We are not looking for advantages or disadvantages,” deMeurisse concluded, “but regardless of cognitive differences, learning a second language is always going to be something that can benefit you, whether those benefits are cognitive, social, or environmental. It will never be a negative to be exposed to a second language.”