View Content #18358

From http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/could-bilingual-education-mold-kids-brains-to-better-resist-distraction/

Could Bilingual Education Mold Kids’ Brains to Better Resist Distraction?
By Samara Freemark and Stephen Smith
September 19, 2014

For decades, psychologists cautioned against raising children bilingual. They warned parents and teachers that learning a second language as a child was bad for brain development. But recent studies have found exactly the opposite. Researchers now believe that when people learn another language, they develop cognitive advantages that improve their attention, self-control and ability to deal with conflicting information.

… In our contemporary, multitasking society, notions have changed. A bilingual person with a strong executive control system may have an edge. “Everything that we do that requires focused, selective attention — ignoring salient distractors that are trying to compete for attention, shifting between two things that we are trying to do at the same time, manipulating information — that is all frontal lobe, executive function stuff,” Bialystok said.

In functional MRI scans of test subjects doing the flanker task, researchers can see that the part of the brain that is believed to house the executive control system uses less blood flow in bilinguals. It’s not working as hard.

Researchers have also discovered that bilingualism may provide some protection for the brains of aging people. Studies show that the onset of dementia occurs later in the brains of bilingual people. The executive control system, researchers say, is the last one to fully develop (think teenagers) and the first to decline, but strengthening it may slow that decline.

Read the full article at http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/09/could-bilingual-education-mold-kids-brains-to-better-resist-distraction/