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Is there a benefit of bilingualism for executive functioning?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2014

RAYMOND M. KLEIN
RAYMOND M. KLEIN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and NeuroscienceDalhousie Universityray.klein@dal.ca
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Extract

Scholars and educators were once concerned that encouraging children to learn more than one language might have adverse cognitive consequences (Darcy, 1953). And for some linguistic capacities (e.g., fluency, vocabulary) this is often true (Bialystok, Craik & Luk, 2012). Unfortunately, such individual costs might discourage governmental policies that are aimed at fostering multi-lingualism, despite its widely acknowledged societal benefits. Peal & Lambert (1962) helped overcome this concern and through her “myth-dispelling” efforts and prodigious empirical output, Bialystok has pushed the pendulum of opinion in the opposite direction.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 29 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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