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A new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggests people who speak two languages have more gray matter in the executive control region of the brain.
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."
This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
I find learning more languages makes it easier to acquire new ones because you get better at it, but idiomatic speech and use of metaphor seem to take a real hit.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:48PM
Maybe it's different if you grow up bilingual. Me I start transposing prepositions and losing deft turn of phrase when I'm in another language too long.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rich on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:25AM
Maybe it's different if you grow up bilingual.
Not from (own) anecdotal evidence. I only started learning English from 5th grade. But it could well be that it's different going from native English to another language, because then it's the first time that English speakers get exposed to nasty declensions (i.e. "ein rotes Auto", "eines roten Autos"...) and the like. While those learning English as second language get very little grammar to do and the "harder" stuff then is only straightforward memorizing of the list of strong verbs and the pronounciation of rare words (e.g. (supermarket) aisle).