The Effects of Bilingualism on Infant Language Development: The Acquisition of Sounds and Words

Bilingual infants display various advantages in several areas, including cognitive control, adaptive learning strategies, neural plasticity, and acoustic sensitivity.

1. cognitive control

At 12 months, bilingual infants were able to learn two different regularities simultaneously whereas monolinguals were only able to learn one. This indicates that bilingual infants have more flexibility in learning language structures

2. adaptive learning strategies

A better cognitive control ability stemming from language switching and separation leads to another advantage of bilingual infants: they pay more attention to contextual cues and arguably use these as well as other cues as adaptive strategies in bilingual language acquisition

3. neural plasticity

Neural plasticity is another advantage that bilingual infants possess. Studies showed that bilingual infants aged 10-12 months displayed more resilient neural sensitivity to non-native consonant contrasts than monolinguals and that bilingual neural responses different from monolinguals as early as 3 months

4. acoustic sensitivity

Link: http://babylab.wp.hum.uu.nl/files/2013/12/liu.pdf

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