Years ago in the study of bilingualism is proving to be beneficial for children, and those investigations that saw pernicious effects on development, often marked by ideological biases that left them objectivity, are being discarded.
Several investigations presented in Washington, in the context of a day of the American Society for the Advancement of Science on "What does bilingualism tell us about our brain?", Confirm that learning two languages does not create confusion in the brain, nor in The case of children.
Even as we have seen, babies are bilingual from the womb, able to discern different languages, which allows their brain to grow and evolve making this distinction.
In one of the studies presented, conducted by experts from the University of Granada, after measuring the response time and brain activity to a question in the case of adult bilinguals, they observed that they are able to activate two languages at the same time, even in situations in those who only need one.
They conclude that Blinguism not only improves attention but also trains memory of these people, as if it were a kind of 'mental gymnastics'.
Bilingualism in babies
More surprising is the finding of another researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. In his work with several babies of four, six and eight months, raised in homes where Catalan or Spanish was spoken interchangeably, he detected that small bilinguals are uneducated able to discern between two languages they don't know.
The children were put several videos without sound in which people appeared speaking in English or French (two unknown languages in the babies' home). Even though they had never heard these languages, the researchers say that the children were able to distinguish them only by the facial expressions of those who appeared in the video.
Evidence, in his opinion, that bilingualism broadens the perceptual capacity of the brain, or that it does not "give ear" to languages. It is not about being smarter, but about working differently. The findings show that bilingual people are, 'multitasking' people, able to process several tasks at the same time and quickly disregard the irrelevant information that their brain perceives.
Long term advantages
A recent study on bilingualism published in the journal 'Neurology' by Elen Byalistok (from Toronto) showed that using two languages every day delay the appearance of Alzheimer's disease by an average of four years.
And although the greatest advantages were observed in people who used both languages on a daily basis, the Canadian researcher points out that even practicing that second language learned in school in summer can be beneficial against dementia.
Switching from one language to another is a stimulus for the brain, so that it makes a kind of 'cognitive reserve'. Your next step will be to check if, in addition to a cognitive improvement, bilingualism also causes physical changes in the structure of the brain.
While studies on the subject continue, it seems clear that bilingualism only reports advantages since childhood, although remember that it is not the same to be bilingual, when a language is acquired, than to learn a language when we grow up or "splash" words in a strange language occasionally watching cartoons.
