Being Bilingual as an Infant

I really enjoyed the talk on Bilingualism by Ellen Bialystok. The main topic of the talk was the idea of executive control and how it leads to the ability to speak another language fluently. She touched on the fact that executive control is needed for a person to direct their attention to the target language. Speaking another language is similar to switching tasks, and this involves inhibiting a previous task in order for a person to update information in their working memory. The most interesting aspects of her talk and paper were the experiments she described. In a particular experiment, children are given the task to detect grammatical errors in certain sentences. The result was the fact that although all the children were able to find the error in a logical sentence, such as "apples growed on trees," mostly children who were bilingual were able to distinguish the difference between grammatical accuracy and logic for a sentence that is somewhat illogical: "apples grew on noses." The bilingual children were able to realize that although the apples cannot grow on noses, the sentence is grammatically correct. This proves their ability to temporarily inhibit the attention on logical meaning that would cause distraction from a somewhat unfamiliar concept. Also, the speaker concluded the ability for bilingual children to switch from one task in order to make a decision, to another task.

This talk correlates with the article "It's never too early for children to learn a second language." In this article, Sieh states that contrary to the belief that teaching an infant more than one language at a time causes difficulties for him or her, it actually leads to stronger literary and reading skills. Speaking "parentese" to a child in one language allows babies to map out the sounds they hear in their brains. However, with the use of magneto-encephalography, researchers found that that the neurons of the infants who were hearing more than one language in "parentese" were activated more than those neurons of infants who were only hearing one language. This shows their ability to distinguish sounds and, as Ellen Bialystok states in her talk, switch between the tasks of comprehending one language from another. What I found interesting is the extent of the impact that vocals and facial expressions have on the baby's "mapping" of the sounds. Each language has a different pitch, and "parentese" allows that pitch to be amplified, making it easier for babies to distinguish between languages. This proves the capability of a bilingual infant's brain to be cognitively flexible.

Works Cited

Sieh, Mabel. "It's Never Too Early for Children to Learn a Second Language, Say Experts." South China Morning Post. N.p., 29 Apr. 2014. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.