Disadvantages Of Bilingualism

There are two types of bilingualism; simultaneous and sequential. There are children who expose two languages in the family environment, including speech-sign language; this group is part of simultaneous bilingualism and also in some countries bilingualism is required and children learn second language later in their life; and this group is part of sequential bilingualism. Besides, the population of sequential bilinguals is very high in Turkey. Whether it is successful or not, in Turkey children expose to English from the beginning of their education and they are required to be bilingual, even trilingual in their later life. Therefore, it is essential to investigate its effects on children. This is one of our reasons to choose this topic. Moreover,

Previously it was believed and found that being bilingual could reduce cognitive ability but these findings are already falsified. The most important benefit of being bilingual is the improvement of the executive control. It is mostly found with brain imaging technics. As the second or more language learn, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain becomes more active. This area is mostly associated with problem solving, attention control, working memory and cognitive flexibility. This augmented executive control can be found in all developmental stages. In a Bialystok’s research (1999, 2004), 4- to 5- years old bilingual children accomplished better scores than their monolingual counterparts in the dimensional-change card-sort task. Moreover, in another study (Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005), in the Children’s Embedded Figures Task, bilingual children were abler to see the both sides of the ambiguous figure. These tasks require perceptual analysis and also the second task requires hindering the original meaning of the stimulus. Additionally, bilingual children were more successful in the Several Reaction Time Tasks and they have smaller Simon Effect (Bialystock, Craik, Klein & Viswanathan, 2004). On the other hand, being a bilingual is not all positive. Bilingual children, show very limited vocabulary knowledge when they are compared with their monolingual counterparts; and this limitedness can be seen across the life-span (Bialystok, 2011). They also have lower scores in the tasks that are required rapid lexical access and retrieval. Furthermore, they have difficulties in the Picture-Naming Tasks, Verbal-Fluency Tasks; they experience more tip-of-the-tongue states and reveal more obstacles in lexical decisions. In addition, in a study which compares monolinguals, bilinguals and speech-sign bilinguals, higher scores in nonverbal flanker task, which displays higher executive control, were only found for verbal bilinguals