How does being multilingual have its pros and cons for influencing cognitive function and throughout

Benefits of being Multilingual

1. Power of Inference

When a person says a word such as “can” we can infer different meanings or connotations aside from the ones pertaining to the spoken language. For example, a person “can” do a certain action, or that a he/she opens a “can” of worms. Different meanings, but with the same word or hearing input. We could also interpret the word through sensory inputs in different languages regardless of the languages being spoken.

2. Better Conflict Management

Multilingual people constantly have a state of competing language processing in the brain when spoken to and when speaking to other people. As a result, increased activity of the language receptors in the brain increases efficiency when dealing with conflicting problems and managing conflicts.

3. Creating Balance

Multilingual individuals constantly deal with multiple language systems activating and inhibiting all at once since the sensory information we receive on a daily basis need to be filtered out in terms of how we understand the world as a whole. Rather than shutting down a part of a brain that processes a certain language, a bilingual Chinese- English person could inhibit their Chinese language processing center when learning or speaking English.

4. Better Cognitive Control- Switching tasks/multitasking

Constant On and Off switches in the brain for language perception has trained a cognitive ability in multilingual individuals to better control brain functions such as multitasking which involves switching from task to task at a fast pace.

5. Sustained Attention- On average Bilingual individuals have higher attention retention rate than monolingual individuals

6. Improvements in Learning

7. Protection against age related diseases such as Alzheimer’s

Downsides of being Multilingual

1. Language Co-Activation

Just as in having a strong power to infer things, there can be a downside in having too strong of a power to associate many things all at once. Being fluent in multiple languages can create a wide reservoir of terms and knowledge that can be applied in many situations, even in ones where we do not wish them to be. For example, in English the word “marker” sounds like “marka” which is Russian for a stamp. This can be quite confusing for a Russian-English bilingual person.

2. Slow Processing

Throughout the huge reservoir of knowledge, many multilingual people face challenges of processing sensory information whether it's visual, auditory, or kinesthetic inputs since they have so much information available to them.

Marian, V., & Shook, A. (2012). The Cognitive Benefits of Being Bilingual.Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2012, 13.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/

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