Thought and Two Languages: The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Development

After 1960s, with more precise methodology, experts in bilingualism found the bilingual environment will accelerates the development of abstract thinking by freeing the child’s thought from the concreteness and "tyranny" of words. To further explain how and what bilingualism benefits, there are five categories here:

1. cognitive flexibility: bilingual children show a marked superiority in symbol substitution(The symbol substitution task involved children's ability to substitute words in a sentence according to the experimenter's instructions) and verbal transformation(he detection of changes in a spoken stimulus that is repeated continuously by a tape loop).

2. linguistic and metalinguistic abilities(bilingualism promoted an early separation of the word sound from the word meaning, the separation of sound and meaning leads to an early awareness of the conventionality of words and the arbitrariness of language. This awareness could promote, in turn, more abstract levels of thinking)

3. concept formation(bilinguals demonstrate a greater grasp of linear measurement concepts and a greater facility to discover additive rules in a string of numbers than their monolingual counterparts)

4. divergent thinking skills and creativity

5. cognitive style (more likely to be field-independent)

Work Cited:

Diaz, R. (1983). Thought and Two Languages: The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Development. Review of Research in Education, 10, 23-54. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1167134

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