Multilingual Children Essay

The following studies explain how multilingual children are exposed to better communicative advantages and cognitive adaptations over monolingual children. The first study, analyzes how infants react to the exposure of different languages and how they can recognize communicative partners related to the language itself. The next study explains how children that are merely exposed to a second language can have similar communicative advantages as bilingual children. Finally, the last study focuses on the cognitive adaptations that children are exposed to in bilingual environments.
As it was mentioned before, the first study analyzed the reaction of an unfamiliar person among monolingual and bilingual 20-month-olds and how they interpreted this …show more content…
These are some of the variables that were measured throughout the whole experiment. Their main results showed that even though the bilingual group demonstrated cognitive advantages over the monolingual group, the multilingual exposure group did not. However, the multilingual exposure group was more successful at t he social communication task just like the bilingual group. This could show that having a diverse language exposure at any point in life could lead people to interpret others’ communicative intent.
One of their weaknesses is the fact that they could not prove the relationship of cognitive skills and social skills among the multilingual group since they it was expected to be the similar to the bilingual …show more content…
Each of them showed different characteristics such as the exposure of different languages in infants and how they can recognize if a person speaks one or more languages. Another important characteristic was the fact on how children that are merely exposed to a second language can have similar communicative advantage as bilingual children. Lastly, some cognitive adaptations that children are exposed to those multilingual environments as