Bilingualism In Cognitive Psychology

Language is one of the essential characteristics that makes human beings different from animals. Is trough language that our society has been able to not only to endure but also develop. Crystal (1977) mentions that language allows us to communicate, think, express emotions, and even express identity to a group. Therefore, is logical that language and its perception has been an important and well-researched topic in cognitive psychology.

In an ever-changing society is common that children grow up in a bilingual family environment. Bilingualism has been a very fascinating and controversial topic in the field of speech perception. In the very beginnings, the lines of research defended that bilingualism creates confusion, which leads to academic

In the article: Bialystok, E., & Craik, F.I.M. (2010). Cognitive and linguistic processing in the bilingual mind. Published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 19-23., their major focus is to present evidence that support the effects of bilingualism on linguistic and cognitive performance. The author establishes that both monolingual and bilingual children can detect grammatical violations in meaningful sentences, however bilinguals are the ones who can detect grammatical errors in semantically anomalous sentences, because they can ignore misleading information. For the author this represents that the bilingual advantage has less to do with metalinguistic knowledge than with an attentional advantage in selectivity and inhibition, which are important process for executive functioning. Bialystok

It is worth mentioning that there are not significant findings where bilingualism is a disadvantage. The researches done so far on this topic has not completely provided support to the hypothesis for all the aspects mentioned before, in any case this mean that we can already reject it. Being fluent in two or more languages requires skill, to be able to switch between them, and understand in both what the world and other people are trying to say is not a simple task. I have seen children switching from one language to another smoothly, as is mentioned in the researches, they sometimes have lower vocabulary, despite this I believe this is a small cost compared to the benefit to be able alternate the languages according to the context needs, it must have an impact on their cognitive development and their executive function, as well on their world conception, identity in general. This is a topic that should continue to be researched. Researchers need to admit the methodological problems and limitations so far identified, they should work with different social economic levels, different languages, etc., because even if is not possible to generalize the results for the whole bilingual population, there are is an opportunity to start identifying under what conditions it becomes a