Werker – bilingualism advantage research

I’m often asked whether babies growing up bilingual have an advantage or a disadvantage in language acquisition, and I think it’s an interesting question but it’s not exactly the way that we try and approach this work. There are groups who claim and show some good evidence there are advantages to bilingualism in terms of flexibility and problem solving and perhaps in reserve in aging and there’s some nice work from Aggie Kovaks and Jaques Mailer that shows that babies who are growing up bilingual are better able to simultaneously learn or to learn one set of rules then change to another set of rules, but if you think about that in the context of language learning, you can think of that as an advantage or you can think of that as an adaptive developmental achievement. So a baby who’s growing up bilingual being able to learn one set of rules then learn another set of rules, you can see how that would be something that they’ve had experience with growing up bilingual  

What our work shows is that there are definitely differences in babies who grow up bilingual versus monolingual and some of those can be, could be imagined, and they might be just overall advantages. So a baby growing up bilingual for example maintains sensitivity to the consonant distinctions used in both of their languages, something they need to do. Even if the da-ta difference is, the categories are different in English and in French, and a baby who is bilingual in English and in French by the time they’re a year old they have the d-t distinction in English as well at the d-t distinction in French whereas a mono lingual baby only has one of those. It’s an advantage for the bilingual baby because they need two sets of distinctions, it wouldn’t be an advantage for the monolingual baby to have two sets of distinctions, it could be seen as a disadvantage if they maintained that. We’ve looked at a lot of different aspects of bilingual acquisition. One that we’ve looked at is visual language discrimination, so a young baby can discriminate the change from one language to the other just by watching the face of somebody who’s speaking to them. So when shown videos of three French English bilingual speakers just with the sound turned off, so reciting little sentences first in English then in French, babies at four months, monolingual or bilingual can discriminate change from one language to the next. By eight months of age, monolingual babies are not sensitive to that cue anymore, and what we’ve published in previous work is that French English babies continue to be sensitive so that’s certainly an advantage for a bilingual learning baby to be able to continue to use cues just in silent talking faces to distinguish them. The monolingual baby can’t do that, so maybe that’s a disadvantage, but maybe they’re paying attention to something else, we don’t know. 

Recently we showed that, and this is work with Nuria Sebastian Gallas in Barcelona that even Spanish Catalan bilingual babies can discriminate the change between visual English and visual French, so it does look like, those are two unfamiliar languages to them, so it does look like there is some kind of heightened sensitivity in the perceptual or attentional system in bilingual babies for paying attention to possible cues that will distinguish languages even when they’re unfamiliar. Is that a general advantage that has consequences in other learning domains or is it something that’s just specific to the language domain we don’t know the answer to that question yet, and we think that’s a really interesting question for further research.