Bilingualism and brain

How does bilingualism affect a person’s brain

Many studies conducted over the years by universities on bilingualism and the brain, in fact how a bilingual person can think and act more efficiently in all of life’s challenges. Here we provide information as we find it from a variety of studies for you to understand and judge. We recommend that you view these videos to the end, and read these articles if you’re interested in providing your child the best of tools to make them robust in dealing with life’s challenges in all their lives.

Next up we have a recent study by Xiaoqian Chai, Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. Follow this link by CitiNews to find how bilingualism can positively affect the brain.

Moreover, the age at which the second language was acquired correlated with this increased efficiency, suggesting that earlier exposure to a second language has lasting positive effects on brain functional organization. Further investigation using the network-based statistics approach indicates that this effect is primarily driven by heightened functional connectivity between association networks and the cerebellum. These findings show that the timing of bilingual learning experience alters the brain functional organization at both global and local levels. (Communications Biology page ). Functional neuroimaging studies during language tasks have found that activation (inferred by fMRI signal) mainly in the right posterolateral cerebellum and in left hemisphere temporal and frontal regions is associated with performance on language tasks… Given that bilinguals at an early age are navigating different phonetic and phonological systems, are engaged in switching and translation, we expected that early L2 learning would enhance global whole-brain efficiency and modularity.

But how does the bilingual brain work? What is the ingredient that ensures an efficient brain? Here is another video for those interested that discusses how speaking more than one language affects your brain.

More studies and evidence to be added soon…