![]() Things to think about when you’re raising multilingual and bilingual children children have increased empathy for other ways of understanding the world.children understand and appreciate different cultures.children can more easily travel and work in different countries and cultures when they grow up.everyone in the community gets a better appreciation of different languages and cultures.boosts your family’s sense of cultural identity and belonging.Ĭommunities: benefits of multilingualism and bilingualismįor your wider community, when children speak more than one language, it means that:.makes it easier for you and your child to be part of your culture.improves communication among your family members.being able to enjoy music, movies, literature and so on in more than one language.įamilies: benefits of multilingualism and bilingualismįor your family, multilingualism and developing your language in your child:.learning and hearing stories directly from family members.feeling confident about communicating and connecting with extended family members and people who speak their heritage language.more diverse and interesting career opportunities later in life.Īlso, if your child grows up speaking more than one language, they might have a better sense of self-worth, identity and belonging.Raising multilingual or bilingual children is good not only for your child or children, but also for your family and your community.Ĭhildren: benefits of multilingualism and bilingualismįor your child, speaking and using more than one language regularly might be linked to: It seems that being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.Raising multilingual and bilingual children: good for children, families and communities Interestingly, we also found that children who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language - for example, those who had grandparents who spoke another language - were just as talented as the bilingual children at this task. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken. Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. If you think about it, this makes intuitive sense. We found that bilingual children were better than monolingual children at this task. Since the adult could see only the medium and large cars, when she said “small” car, she must be referring to the child’s “medium.” For example, an adult said to the child: “Ooh, a small car! Can you move the small car for me?” Children could see three cars - small, medium and large - but were in position to observe that the adult could not see the smallest car. We took a group of children in the United States, ages 4 to 6, from different linguistic backgrounds, and presented them with a situation in which they had to consider someone else’s perspective to understand her meaning. One study from my developmental psychology lab - conducted in collaboration with the psychologists Boaz Keysar, Zoe Liberman and Samantha Fan at the University of Chicago, and published last year in the journal Psychological Science - shows that multilingual children can be better at communication than monolingual children. Now, two new studies demonstrate that multilingual exposure improves not only children’s cognitive skills but also their social abilities. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function - which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities. But in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. Some of which are that it allows you to take advantage of new experiences new conversations. It’s well-known that being bilingual has obvious advantages.
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