The effect of a bilingual environment on children’s language development

  In today’s society, multilingualism is the norm and monolingualism is the non-norm.  In Canada, 11.9% of the population speaks a language other than English and French at home [11] (English and French are the official languages of Canada); in Toronto, the city with the largest first population in Canada, this percentage increases to 31% [12].  In the United States, 21% of school-age children (ages 5-17) speak a language other than English at home [13], and this percentage will increase in the coming years [14].  Worldwide, it is estimated that the number of people who speak English as a second language already far exceeds the number of native English speakers [15], while the number of bilingual children is almost as high as the number of monolingual children [1].  Following this trend, in the near future, more and more children will grow up in bilingual or multilingual environments. Sometimes bilingualism is a necessity, such as when children learn a language before school and start learning the dominant language after school when their parents are not proficient in the dominant language of the society; sometimes bilingualism is a choice, and some parents want to expose their children to multiple languages from an early age even if they do not speak a second language themselves. This is because acquiring multiple languages at an early age can be very beneficial to a child’s mental and intellectual development, as well as their future academic and career development.  The following is a detailed description of the benefits of bilingualism/multilingualism for children’s growth and development: 1. Bilingual children have significant advantages over monolingual children in terms of resistance to distractions and concentration [16,17]. 2.  2. Bilingual children perform better and are more creative in planning and solving complex problems compared to monolingual children [1,18].  3, Among adults, brain degeneration and memory loss are significantly less in bilingual/multilingual groups than in monolingual groups [16].  4, Some experiments have shown that the onset of amnesia in bilingual adults is delayed by about 4 years compared to monolingual adults [1].  5, People who are bilingual or multilingual have access to more contacts and resources [18].  6. In Canada, English and French speakers earn about 10% more than English speakers and 40% more than French speakers [16].  Bilingualism brings cognitive advantages in terms of “attention” and “problem solving”.  The basic principle is that bilingual/multilingual speakers have two or more parallel language systems. When using language to express and communicate, they first select the language that is most appropriate for the current conversational context and target audience from the two or more language systems, and then inhibit the other language system to ensure that the selected language operates smoothly and is not disturbed. This process exercise is a good exercise of the speaker’s ability to suppress redundant information and focus on key information. This long-term exercise makes bilinguals significantly better than monolinguals in these two areas. “There is no other way to do this, but by hand.”  Recently York University in Toronto conducted a comparative experiment on the cognitive abilities of infants growing up in bilingual and monolingual environments. The subjects were 63 24-month-old infants. One of the multilingual infants was exposed to both languages from birth. The experiment consisted of engaging infants in a series of tests that tested the self-controlinthought and executivefunctioning of their thinking. The results of the experiment showed that although the two groups did not show significant differences in performance on most of the tests, bilingual infants performed significantly better than monolingual infants on one test, TheShapeStroopTest. This test was administered to two groups of infants who were shown the same set of pictures in random order. The pictures were of large fruits containing small fruits, such as a large banana containing a small orange. The subjects were then asked to point out which small fruit was on the way. This one simple test required the infants to be able to inhibit their reflex to the large fruit and focus their attention on the small fruit. The results of the experiment showed that infants in the bilingual group got 50% of this test correct, compared to 31% in the monolingual group. This means that the bilingual children had at least two cognitive advantages over the monolingual children: selective attention and cognitive flexibility are both very important components of executivefunctioning, so overall, the bilingual children had better executive (i.e., problem-solving) skills than the monolingual children.