Werker – bilingualism advantage

So I like to think about what babies are figuring out in infancy as advantaging them for their particular linguistic environment, and if it has other cognitive consequences, I think those will be really interesting to study as well and I’m sure that there are some advantages to bilingualism, as I said they have been demonstrated, but I suspect, and there is evidence, that there are some costs as well, so the rate of processing information is just a little bit slower. The rate of labeling, of responding and pushing a button to which object a word goes with is just a little bit slower in bilinguals because there are two lexicons that have to be consulted, so this is not a surprise. Does that rate difference have any consequences? Maybe not, maybe not at all, and the cognitive advantages may far outweigh, but I still think the most interesting question is how the human mind adapts to the input that its getting in a way that optimizes the environment that the child is going to be living in.  

There isn’t any good evidence that bilingualism or trilingualism makes one more able to learn yet another language at the perceptual and cognitive processing level there is no good evidence. It’s very likely that it has an impact at the willingness to learn level, but perceptually and cognitively there is no good evidence that it facilitates learning of yet another language.