Children who are raised in a bilingual home appear to have a head start in building the part of the brain that deals with everything from impulse control to mental flexibility. These findings are in a new study that’s out of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.
For the study, which is published in the journal Developmental Science, researchers placed 11-month-old babies, who were on the verge of uttering their first words, under a magnetoencephalography machine. The study’s lead author, Naja Ferjan-Ramirez, said the machine looks like “a hair dryer from Mars.”
The babies from Spanish- and English-speaking households and children from homes where only English is spoken, listened to a series of simple sounds such as "da" and "ta." Some of the sounds were specific to English and others were sounds heard in both English and Spanish.
The magnetoencephalography machine recorded activity in the babies brains while they were listening to these simple tones. Researchers found that based on brain imaging, the bilingual babies responded to English and Spanish in equal measure.
The other discovery was the bilingual children had more activity in the areas of the brain that are related to executive function, which is the ability to regulate our actions and responses to things.
“Being able to withhold responses, being able to inhibit, being able to switch between different tasks, being more flexible in thinking, for example,” said Ferjan-Ramirez.
Ferjan-Ramirez said this doesn’t mean that bilingual babies inherently smarter than their monolingual peers. However, being bilingual at an early age does mean these children get a head start on developing executive function skills through additional practice. In this case, the practice involved the mental fluidity required to switch back and forth between languages, a skill children are capable of within the first year of life.
