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 Pompea 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?

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at New York Times, Science.

Published in the Science section of the New York Times, March 17, 2012

Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.

Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.

But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.

Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language.

Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

“What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.”

The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age.

Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they’ve heard during fetal development.

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.

In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.

In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged.

“For a baby who’s growing up bilingual, it’s like, ‘Hey, this is important information,’ ” Dr. Werker said.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information.

Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a “hair dryer from Mars,” and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens.

Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same “dose” of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.

“This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”

 

 

How to Wean the Attachment to Sippy Cups

Every milestone in your child’s life is cause for celebration, but some habits are harder to break than others. Sippy cups are often used to help wean a child from the bottle, which can result in a passionate attachment to the sippy cup. But sippy cups can be just as damaging to teeth as the bottle. Fortunately, with a little patience and a plan, you can wean your child from sippy cups with a minimum of fuss.

WHEN TO WEAN

All children should be weaned from the bottle by 12 to 14 months of age, according to experts at Columbia University. By the age of 18 months, your child should be using a cup with no lid. This may mean more messes for you to clean up, but it is necessary to protect the health of your child’s baby teeth.

WHY TO WEAN

Sippy cups allow liquids to pool behind your child’s front teeth in much the same way that a bottle does. This can lead to tooth decay if you allow your child to sleep with a sippy cup in her mouth. Walking around with a sippy cup is unsafe because even though the spouts are rounded, the hard plastic can injure lips, gums, teeth or your child’s palate if she falls while drinking and sipping. Giving sippy cups only at mealtimes is one way to avoid this. It also helps keep your toddler from using sippy cups for self-soothing, which can make it much harder to wean her from them.

 HOW TO WEAN

Do not put anything other than water in a sippy cup if your child has already developed the habit of walking around with one. Offer juice and milk at the table in a regular cup. Cut down on the number of times per day that you allow the sippy cup to leave the table. Allow the sippy cup before bed, but brush or wipe down your child’s teeth and leave the sippy cup behind while you read in bed so that your child will learn to sleep without it. This is easier said than done with a strong-willed child, but if you are patient and consistent, he will learn to fall asleep without it.

TIPS AND HINTS

Little kids get attached to things as a way of feeling in control of their environment. Weaning your child from drinking out of a sippy cup does not mean that you have to make the cups vanish from her life. Toss the lids away and let her play with the cups in the bathtub or the sandbox. Fill them with dry cereal or other kid-safe snacks rather than liquids. Line clean sippy cups up on the dresser or bookshelf and sit small stuffed animals in them.

REFERENCES

• Columbia University: My Smile Buddy: Bottles and Sippy Cups
• University of Southern California School of Medicine: Nutrition and Oral Health
• Florida Department of Children and Families: Are Sippy Cups Dangerous to My Child’s Teeth?

It’s Official – There’s No Such Thing as Educational TV for Babies

The American Association of Pediatrics reports that video screen time has no educational benefits for young children.

 

THE AAP URGES PARENTS TO LIMIT TV FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: October 18, 2011

Parents of infants and toddlers should limit the time their children spend in front of televisions, computers, self-described educational games and even grown-up shows playing in the background, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned on Tuesday. Video screen time provides no educational benefits for children under age 2 and leaves less room for activities that do, like interacting with other people and playing, the group said.

The recommendation, announced at the group’s annual convention in Boston, is less stringent than its first such warning, in 1999, which called on parents of young children to all but ban television watching for children under 2 and to fill out a “media history” for doctor’s office visits. But it also makes clear that there is no such thing as an educational program for such young children, and that leaving the TV on as background noise, as many households do, distracts both children and adults.

“We felt it was time to revisit this issue because video screens are everywhere now, and the message is much more relevant today that it was a decade ago,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the lead author of the academy’s policy, which appears in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Dr. Brown said the new policy was less restrictive because “the Academy took a lot of flak for the first one, from parents, from industry, and even from pediatricians asking, ‘What planet do you live on?’ ” The recommendations are an attempt to be more realistic, given that, between TVs, computers, iPads and smartphones, households may have 10 or more screens.

The worry that electronic entertainment is harmful to development goes back at least to the advent of radio and has steadily escalated through the age of “Gilligan’s Island” and 24-hour cable TV to today, when nearly every child old enough to speak is plugged in to something while their parents juggle iPads and texts. So far, there is no evidence that exposure to any of these gadgets causes long-term developmental problems, experts say.

Still, recent research makes it clear that young children learn a lot more efficiently from real interactions — with people and things — than from situations appearing on video screens. “We know that some learning can take place from media” for school-age children, said Georgene Troseth, a psychologist at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, “but it’s a lot lower, and it takes a lot longer.”

Unlike school-age children, infants and toddlers “just have no idea what’s going on” no matter how well done a video is, Dr. Troseth said.

The new report strongly warns parents against putting a TV in a very young child’s room and advises them to be mindful of how much their own use of media is distracting from playtime. In some surveys between 40 and 60 percent of households report having a TV on for much of the day — which distracts both children and adults, research suggests.

“What we know from recent research on language development is that the more language that comes in — from real people — the more language the child understands and produces later on,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University.

After the academy’s recommendation was announced, the video industry said parents, not professional organizations, were the best judges. Dan Hewitt, a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association, said in an e-mail that the group has a “long and recognized record of educating parents about video game content and emphasizing the importance of parental awareness and engagement.”

“We believe that parents should be actively involved in determining the media diets of their children,” he said.

Few parents of small children trying to get through a day can resist plunking the youngsters down in front of the screen now and then, if only so they can take a shower — or check their e-mail.

“We try very hard not to do that, but because both me and my husband work, if we’re at home and have to take a work call, then yes, I’ll try to put her in front of ‘Sesame Street’ for an hour,” Kristin Gagnier, a postgraduate student in Philadelphia, said of her 2-year-old daughter. “But she only stays engaged for about 20 minutes.”

In one survey, 90 percent of parents said their children under 2 watched some from of media, whether a TV show like “Yo Gabba Gabba!” or a favorite iPhone app. While some studies find correlations between overall media exposure and problems with attention and language, no one has determined for certain which comes first.

The new report from the pediatrics association estimates that for every hour a child under 2 spends in front of a screen, he or she spends about 50 minutes less interacting with a parent, and about 10 percent less time in creative play. It recommends that doctors discuss setting “media limits” for babies and toddlers with parents, though it does not specify how much time is too much.

“As always, the children who are most at risk are exactly the very many children in our society who have the fewest resources,” Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, said in an e-mail.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 19, 2011, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Parents Urged Again To Limit TV For Youngest.

 

For more articles on childcare, parenting, San Diego family living and children’s health, visit the Ambassador Nannies blog

How to Create a Routine for Toddler Starting School

Oct 7, 2011 | By Melissa Lewis

Overview

A toddler starting school is exposed to a new world of structure, and the best way to help him adjust is to practice before you drop him off for his first day. Out-of-sync sleep habits and an unfamiliar pace might lead to morning meltdowns that slow you down. If you create a routine, your child will transition more smoothly, and you’ll keep your schedule — and sanity — intact.

Step 1
Set the alarm clock. If your toddler is accustomed to a relaxed morning schedule, ease him into waking at a set time. You might buy an alarm clock made just for little kids so he can learn to wake himself up. Start setting the alarm together every night a few weeks before school starts, if possible. Observe how he manages his new routine and adjust his waking time to suit his pace so mornings aren’t harried once school starts. Get your child accustomed to scheduled nap times if it will be part of his school-day routine.

Step 2
Schedule your toddler’s days to give him a preview of preschool. What to Expect, a spin-off website that complements Heidi Murkoff’s pregnancy and child development books, recommends preparing for preschool by “playing school.” Mimic the flow of a day at school: get ready in the morning, sit at the table with paper and crayons, have a snack and read aloud to your toddler. Explain that his experience at school will include similar activities and how they’ll occur in a particular order.

Step 3
Take the backpack and lunchbox your child will use for school to the park for a picnic. The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families suggests gearing up for the start of preschool with fun activities that help your child learn basic preschool skills. Let him practice packing and unpacking his things so he feels comfortable with the drawstrings, snaps and zippers he’ll be dealing with every day.

Step 4
Prepare for mornings the night before. The best way to streamline your toddler’s routine in the morning is to start getting ready before bedtime. Designate a spot for shoes, jackets, and backpacks near the door and make your child responsible for putting his school things in place at night. Have him help you pack his lunch; he’ll feel more involved and doing it the night before saves time in the morning. Choose his outfit together and lay it out before you tuck him into bed. When you’re saying “goodnight,” ask him what he’d like for breakfast in the morning to eliminate indecisiveness when you’re in a rush to get out the door.

A Few Tips
• Make a favorite CD your toddler’s morning soundtrack. Synchronizing the same songs with the same tasks each morning creates a fun schedule for toddlers that’s easy to follow.

• Create a chart for tasks your child needs to complete to get ready for school and hang it in a convenient spot. Help him check items off the list each morning and offer small rewards for staying on task for a whole week. An incentive — a DVD rental or trip to the park — might keep him more interested in his new routine.

• Don’t waste time rushing back home if you’re already on your way to school. Keep a few essentials in the car in case you forget something and replenish them periodically. Packaged snacks and items for show-and-tell are simple last-minute lifesavers, while a clean shirt or pair of pants could help you get to school on time even if your child spills his juice in the backseat.

This article originally appeared at http://www.livestrong.com