Bilingualism is the ability to speak or recognize two different languages (Merriam-Webster, n.d.); being bilingual has been known to be beneficial to cognition in several ways. While there are numerous advantages to bilingualism, there are also disadvantages that need to be understood as well. The advantages and disadvantages of bilingualism necessitate that second language acquisition should be approached with full knowledge of what bilingualism entails as well as the effect it can have both in and out of a professional setting. Understanding bilingualism is important for fiction and non-fiction writers who have a character or person in their book who speaks more than one language so that they can accurately portray that character or person.

Major Research Findings on Bilingualism

According to the Associated Press, the current trend of bilingualism has 66 percent of the world’s children being raised to be bilingual (Marian & Shook, 2012); the fact that so many children are being raised bilingual necessitated research into the effect bilingualism has on the brain, cognitive systems, and neurological systems. Research has found that the benefits from bilingualism span from early childhood to old age as the cognitive and neurological benefits assist in the efficient processing of information, which in turn assists in decreasing the mental decline that comes from old age (University of Groningen, n.d.). The patterns of these benefits have been shown to be the same regardless of when a person acquires a second language.

Advantages of Bilingualism

Research has proven that the brains of bilingual people can have better attention and task-switching capacities as their brains have developed the ability to inhibit one language while using another (Marian &Shook, 2012). Bialystok and Poarch (2014) found that bilingualism induces changes in language and cognitive abilities with advantages in executive control and an improved set of processes for controlled attention, inhibition, and shifting. It was further hypothesized that these changes, as a result of bilingualism, could assist in mitigating the cognitive decline that results due to aging, which suggests that learning more than one language can improve a person’s cognitive abilities and decrease their cognitive decline from aging. Marian and Shook (2012) found that children learning bilingualism can also benefit from the advantages as bilingualism can help children to be able to better adjust to environmental changes.

Krizman et al. (2012) found that in comparison to monolinguals, bilinguals are able to better encode a sound’s fundamental frequency amidst background noise better than monolinguals; this difference in encoding is believed to be related to the advantages in auditory attention the bilinguals benefit from. Krizman et al. (2012) tested this in a research study that had monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds both with and without background noise; the results of the brain stem responses were compared to find that the responses were similar without background noise, but that with background noise the bilinguals had a more active response.

The increase in auditory attention stems from the fact that bilinguals have to manage more than one language at a time which allows them to improve their cognitive controls and sensory processes (Krizman et al., 2012). The improved cognition and sensory processing is believed to assist people in being able to better process information in the environment, which in turn allows for improved learning, better conflict management skills, and the ability to learn new languages easier (Marian &Shook, 2012). While there are many advantages to bilingualism, there are still some disadvantages to it.