http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2014/11/bilingual-brains-better-equipped-to-process-information.html
This is a good read for all of you aspiring or accomplished bilinguals. I'm sure you already know of the many benefits of knowing multiple languages, but I think this article breaks it down well. It talks about a study that was done on bilinguals and monolinguals, which tested their brains' filtering abilities and the bilinguals scored remarkably higher. It also described a study which found that bilingual children were much more capable of filtering out noise in the classroom and effectively retaining more information. I think these tests prove that bilingual people simply do not get distracted nearly as easy as monolinguals and I think that is a great quality to have. It has added even more motivation for me to learn my target languages.
Interesting. You would think that monolinguals would be able to concentrate more since they only have one language to think in. Before taking this class, I would have believe a bilingual would have more difficulty in concentrating with another language floating around in their brain but now I understand that that is not so.
ReplyDeleteI do wish someone would give us monolinguals some credit though ahaha. I don't know for what but I feel like there may be a stigma in being monolingual nowadays. I guess we can blame globalization for that! Anyway, nice article!
It kind of makes sense that bilingual students can filter out the noise, and are not as easily distracted. I feel like if you knew more than one language and you constantly heard the two of them being spoken, you would learn to drown them out to concentrate on different things. I would imagine it is the same concept when in the classroom or other situations when you would need to pay attention to something. Great article!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article Scott! I think its cool that the bilingual speakers were able to filter out competing but irrelevant words. Yet another benefit of speaking two languages!
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