Bilingual Argument Analysis

This article was about the important but only recently recognized consequences of being raised in a bilingual environment. There are some pretty obvious benefits of being bilingual, but this article discusses some that were not so easily observed: better cognitive and social skills. The article goes into detail about two new experiments that psychologists have performed to really get a grasp of how bilingualism affects cognitive and social skills. The first study demonstrated that multilingual children might be better at communication than children who are raised in a monolingual household. In the experiment, the children were placed in a situation in which they had to consider someone else's perspective in order to understand what was being asked of them. The researchers concluded that bilingual children performed better in this situation than monolingual children and interpreted that this is because bilingual children often have to take context into consideration in order to understand the languages that are spoken around them on a daily basis. This leads to another conclusion that researchers made about monolingual children that are exposed to another language often. Because these children have also developed their skills dealing with context, they performed similarly to the bilingual

In fact, these participants were mostly unable to speak at all but were being raised in either multi or monolingual homes. The study demonstrated that the babies that lived in multilingual homes had already begun to understand the importance of adopting another person's perspective for communication. Together, these two studies helped researchers concluded that multicultural exposure creates the basic skills of interpersonal understanding. This means that being bilingual, or even just being around multiple languages, helps children develop more advanced communication