{"id":246,"date":"2016-03-30T12:52:10","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T12:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/?p=246"},"modified":"2018-06-04T15:36:32","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T15:36:32","slug":"superior-social-skills-tied-to-bilinguals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/30\/superior-social-skills-tied-to-bilinguals\/","title":{"rendered":"Superior Social Skills Tied To Bilinguals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"It’s\u00a0well-known that being\u00a0bilingual has\u00a0 obvious advantages. Some of which are that it allows you to take advantage of new experiences new conversations.\u00a0\u00a0But in recent years,\u00a0psychology researchers have demonstrated<\/a>\u00a0some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function \u2014 which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities.<\/p>\n

Now, two new studies demonstrate that multilingual exposure improves not only children\u2019s cognitive skills but also their social abilities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One study from my developmental psychology lab \u2014 conducted in collaboration with the psychologists Boaz Keysar, Zoe Liberman and Samantha Fan at the University of Chicago, and\u00a0published last year in the journal Psychological Science<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 shows that multilingual children can be better at communication than monolingual children.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s perspective to understand her meaning. For example, an adult said to the child: \u201cOoh, a small car! Can you move the small car for me?\u201d Children could see three cars \u2014 small, medium and large \u2014 but were in position to observe that the adult could not see the smallest car. Since the adult could see only the medium and large cars, when she said \u201csmall\u201d car, she must be referring to the child\u2019s \u201cmedium.\u201d<\/p>\n

We found that bilingual children were better than monolingual children at this task. If you think about it, this makes intuitive sense. Interpreting someone\u2019s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. 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<\/a> and places in which different languages are spoken.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, we also found that children who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language \u2014 for example, those who had grandparents who spoke another language \u2014 were just as talented as the bilingual children at this task. It seems that being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s\u00a0well-known that being\u00a0bilingual has\u00a0 obvious advantages. Some of which are that it allows you to take advantage of new experiences new conversations.\u00a0\u00a0But in recent years,\u00a0psychology researchers have demonstrated\u00a0some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function \u2014 which is critical for problem solving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,50,34,7],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-educational","tag-actfl-nabe-tesol-biliteracy-lnguage-testing-high-school-lti-testing-academic","tag-bilingual","tag-child-development-language-development","tag-language-learning","tag-language-testing"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ltidevcloud.languagetesting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}