The Bilingual Edge

For instance, among executives, 100 percent in Hong Kong, 97 percent in Singapore, and 95 percent in Indonesia can negotiate in at least two languages.

parents see knowledge of their heritage language as an important source of pride and self-esteem for their child. They are right! There’s a lot of research evidence that children do best in school—and best in life overall—when they have a strong sense of identity and of where they come from. Many researchers have concluded that immigrant groups to the United States who maintained their cultural heritage at home—for instance, some Chinese and Indian groups—also provided their children with the strength to face challenges, and sometimes inequalities, at school. In contrast, total assimilation or loss of cultural heritage can lead to less successful outcomes at school.

SPOTLIGHT ON RESEARCH:
Building Friendships Across Language Lines
In a 1983 evaluation of a Spanish-English two-way immersion program, researchers Cazabon, Lambert, and Hall wanted to see if children formed social groups based on ethnicity or language. Children were asked questions about their best friends—who they ate lunch with, who they would invite home, who they would choose to play games with, and who they liked to sit next to. While younger children showed some preference for friends based on ethnicity or language, by the third grade, children were equally likely to have friends from different backgrounds. Linguistic or ethnic differences were no longer a factor! After some time in the two-way program, students had come to value friends as individuals rather than as members of any particular group. In other words, children learned the very important lesson in life that what matters most deep down is not what you look like or how you talk, but who you are.

And research tells us when children learn a second language they are more likely to have positive attitudes toward speakers of that language.

while ignoring the meaning of the sentence. Children were given three sentence types:
grammatically acceptable and sensible: In which bed does the baby sleep?
grammatically unacceptable but sensible: In which bed does baby the sleep?
grammatically acceptable but not sensible: In which bed does the spoon sleep?
Bialystok found that monolingual children were more easily misled by the meaning of the sentence (for example, they judged sentences like “In which bed does the spoon sleep?” as ungrammatical). Bilingual children, on the other hand, were better at ignoring distracting information (in this case, the meaning of the sentence) while also correctly judging the grammar of the sentences. In a nutshell, bilinguals seem better equipped than monolinguals to focus on the grammatical task at hand.

SPOTLIGHT ON RESEARCH:
In Which Bed Does the Spoon Sleep?
In her 2001 book, Ellen Bialystok, a well-known researcher on bilingualism, helped us understand why bilingual children show advantages in metalinguistic awareness. She demonstrated that bilingual children outperform monolinguals in what she calls their “cognitive control of linguistic processes.”
Bialystok asked approximately 120 children, aged five to nine, to judge sentences as grammatically acceptable or grammatically unacceptable

First, people with advanced knowledge of more than one language seem to be more creative. How is creativity measured, you may be wondering—it seems like a pretty abstract concept. Well, most frequently by asking questions like: “How many ways could you use an empty water bottle?” On these sorts of tests, bilinguals tend to produce more answers and also more creative answers. For instance, for the water bottle question, most of us would come up with the obvious answer (“filling it with water”), but bilinguals are more likely to come up with other answers too, like “filling it with sand and making a paperweight.”