The Role Of Bilingualism In Language Development

Early acquisition of vocabulary, and the development of linguistic and communicative competence have been largely associated with the input children get from their environment. The social world, home environment, and routines children are exposed to provide the input they need in order to become competent speakers. Even when the child is in utero, the spoken language outside of the womb affects children’s sensitivity to certain sounds. Consistent with this idea, there is evidence showing that the language input—including child’s native language and other languages child is exposed to—builds the foundation of the child’s language development (Mann, 2013). As language is the outcome of what children hear, bilingualism—a situation in which the …show more content…
For example, in a study assessing the academic achievements of bilinguals, Rumberger and Larson (1998) found that there was a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive abilities, by concluding that bilinguals had better grades and lower dropout rates compared to monolinguals. Similarly, in their study, Kovacs and Mehler (2009) suggested that bilingual infants employ certain mechanisms to efficiently process the linguistic signals coming from the languages they are exposed …show more content…
For example, Green (1998) proposed an inhibitory control model showing that there are multiple levels of control mechanisms involved in language production. He referred to the idea that preverbal infants, when exposed to multiple languages early in life, build up separate representation mechanisms for those languages; and suggested that in order for one to produce any kind of speech, one has to constantly control the multiple languages to administer the linguistic properties and representations of the target language (Green, 1998). This model provides evidence for improvement habitual employment of multiple languages has on infants’ cognitive control abilities. By employing this inhibitory control model, one study investigated infants’ ability to engage in cognitive control when performing nonverbal tasks. It was concluded that bilingual children performed better than monolinguals due to their ability to inhibit and control the languages (Bialystok, 1999). As bilingual children produce different languages they hear in their input, they start realizing the differences between the languages and develop an understanding of how languages work, which in turn provides them with the benefit of performing better than