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One important executive function is inhibition, the ability to discard irrelevant or unimportant stimuli and focus on the key stimuli. Improvements in learning abilitiesĪs mentioned earlier, multilingual people have more developed executive functions. Multilingual people tend to solve complex problems in more creative ways than their monolingual peers, no matter what kind of problem is being solved. This translates into other areas as improved creativity and problem-solving, as well as the ability to perceive situations in different ways. Learning a new language requires the brain to express similar thoughts in different ways and because of this multilingual people develop greater cognitive flexibility.
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Greater cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills Psssst! Check out Brainscape's flashcards for any foreign language to learn twice as efficiently as any other study method! 4. A more developed executive control system allows multilingual people to better perform tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking, and sustained attention. And this is why multilingual people tend to have better developed executive control systems, the part of the brain that controls your ability to switch your attention between things and exercise working memory. When you are multilingual, you constantly switch between languages without thinking about it. More efficient and better developed executive control in the brain In fact, several studies have demonstrated that bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years! Even better, bilingual patients who do develop Alzheimer’s tend to display less decay in cognitive abilities than monolingual patients.
#ADVANTAGES OF BEING MONOLINGUAL HOW TO#
Read: ' Learning a new language when you’re older and how to do it!' And it turns out that jumping between languages-or acquiring a new one-is a particularly effective way to attain this benefit! Many studies have shown that the more elderly people "exercise" their brains every day, the less cognitive decline they experience overall. Read: ' Why you should practice SPEAKING a second language' 2. Multilingual people also tend to be more effective communicators, more exact editors, and more compelling writers, because they better understand how languages function, including in their native language. These people can more quickly pick up on the structure of any language and clearly understand how it can be used. A better, innate understanding of how language worksīecause learning a second (or third, or fourth) language brings your attention to the mechanics of the two languages, (including how they differ), multilingual people tend to understand things like grammar, conjugations, and sentence structure better than monolinguals. 8 Demonstrated cognitive benefits of being multilingual 1. In fact, these benefits can positively and profoundly impact your cognition until well into old age! So, read on to discover some of the many cognitive benefits of being multilingual! When a person is multilingual, they reap the social benefits of being able to communicate with and blend into a whole new community and culture of people.īut there are other significant benefits to speaking more than one language such as career benefits and, the subject of this article, the cognitive benefits of being multilingual.
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Recent studies estimate that over half the world’s population is multilingual to some extent, speaking more than just one language.
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