Conclusion Of Bilingualism In Psychology

As one of the features that distinguish humans from other living beings, the ability of using language can considered to be the crown jewel of cognition. Apparently, humans use language to express themselves to the outer world. From an evolutionary point of view, use of language had become a “human must” as the social environment become more complex. Consequently, humans needed language to create divisions of labor, to develop social systems and customs, to communicate thoughts and most importantly to transfer knowledge. Bilingualism is a major area of interest within the field of psychology as well as linguistics, since it serves significant contributions to human cognition. This proposal will provide a brief report on the concept of bilingualism and its impact on the cognitive processes, particularly attentional mechanisms.

Bilingualism

According to definition of The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology (2009), bilingualism means the ability to use two or more languages in daily life, regardless of the degree of proficiency and fluency as far as individuals can communicate and are qualified in both languages. Authors of The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology (2009) describes two kinds of

Bilingualism is associated with poorer verbal fluency and outperformed by monolinguals on lexical access tasks (Bialystok, Craik and Luk, 2008). Likewise, bilingualism has an impact on vocabulary size and although bilingual individuals have two labels for each concept and have an extensive vocabulary when words from both languages are counted, their vocabulary of each language is smaller compared to monolinguals’ (Mindt et al, 2008). Moreover, bilinguals are slower in picture naming tasks compared to monolinguals (Gollan et al, 2008), are more prone to tip-of-the-tongue failure than monolinguals unless the stimuli had a translatable cognate name (Gollan and Acenas,