Reading Passage 3: Growing Up Bilingual
For much of the twentieth century, parents who spoke two languages were often advised to choose one and abandon the other. Educators and doctors warned that a child exposed to two languages would become confused, fall behind at school and perhaps never master either language fully. Families who had migrated were particularly likely to receive this advice, and many complied, with the result that their children grew up unable to speak with their own grandparents. Looking back, it is remarkable how little evidence supported such confident warnings. The early studies on which they were based typically compared bilingual children from poor immigrant families with monolingual children from far wealthier homes, and then attributed every difference in test scores to language.
By the end of the century, the pendulum had swung decisively the other way. A series of experiments appeared to show that bilingual children were not merely unharmed by their two languages but actually advantaged. In tasks that required them to ignore misleading information, such as sorting cards by colour when their shape suggested a different rule, bilingual children often responded faster than their monolingual peers. The proposed explanation was elegant: because both languages are always active in a bilingual brain, speakers must constantly suppress the one they do not need, and this daily practice strengthens a general capacity for control and attention. Newspapers and parenting magazines enthusiastically reported that a second language could make children smarter.
It is here that I believe a note of caution is needed. Over the past fifteen years, attempts to repeat the original experiments with larger and more carefully matched groups have frequently failed to find any advantage at all. Some researchers have suggested that the early positive results reflected a familiar problem in science: studies that find a striking effect are more likely to be published than those that find nothing, so the literature as a whole gives a distorted picture. Others argue that the advantage is real but small, and appears only in certain tasks or at certain ages. What seems clear is that the bold claims made in the popular press went well beyond what the evidence could support.
Part of the difficulty is that 'bilingual' is not a single category. A child who hears one language at home and another at school, a teenager who has studied a foreign language for five years, and an adult who switches between three languages at work every day are all described as bilingual, yet their experiences differ enormously. The age at which a second language is acquired, how often each language is used, how well it is spoken, and whether a person moves between them within a single conversation may all matter. So too may the social setting: speaking a minority language that is looked down upon is a very different experience from speaking two languages that are both widely respected. Studies that treat bilingualism as a simple yes-or-no variable are therefore likely to produce inconsistent results, and it is perhaps not surprising that they have.
None of this means that the old fears were justified. On the contrary, research has consistently found that children raised with two languages reach the major milestones of language development at broadly the same ages as other children. Bilingual toddlers may know fewer words in each individual language than a monolingual child of the same age, but when the words from both languages are counted together, their vocabulary is typically just as large. The habit of mixing languages within a sentence, which once alarmed teachers, is now understood not as a sign of confusion but as a skilled and rule-governed practice that is common in bilingual communities around the world.
The greater risk for many families is not confusion but loss. Where one language dominates schools, media and public life, children often stop using the language of their parents once they start school, even if they continue to understand it. Within three generations, a family language can disappear entirely. Maintaining it requires sustained effort: regular contact with other speakers, books and media, and, above all, situations in which the child genuinely needs the language rather than simply being told to use it. Visits to relatives who speak no other language, for instance, often achieve more than years of parental reminders.
In my view, the debate over cognitive advantages has distracted attention from the most persuasive reasons for raising children bilingually. A second language allows a child to communicate with relatives, to take part in a cultural heritage and, later, to work and travel more widely. These benefits do not depend on whether bilingual children perform a few milliseconds faster on laboratory tests. Parents who decide to pass on two languages should do so because the languages themselves are valuable, not because they have been promised a cleverer child.
