Bi-lingual? You’re officially smarter than people who only speak one language!
Posted by Filed under Education
I’ve always thought of my multi-lingual friends as supremely clever people, and it turns out this belief is now supported by science!
Researchers at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, have found that bi-lingual people have a heightened ability to monitor their environment. Lead researcher in Speech Production and Bi-lingualism, Albert Costa Martinez, explains further; “Bi-linguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language. It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.”
The study compared bi-linguals with monolinguals whilst monitoring various tasks. The research concluded that the bi-linguals not only performed better, but they used less brain activity to assess behavioural tasks, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
Source: New York Times