And not just languages, either. A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared babies' ability to both process linguisitic information and to correctly anticipate based on new information, a mental process linked to what neuropsychologists call "executive function." Babies rasied in bilingual households performed better than monolingual babies, although the study's lead scientist suggests that the monolingual babies will eventually catch up with their bilingual peers.
Undertaken at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, the research may change attitudes in Europe, where Jacques Mehler, the study's author, says that "parents are wary of giving a bilingual education to their kids and tryto speak only one language." Given the geographical proximity and relative ease of exposing an Italian child to, say, French, it seems almost criminal not to try.
For parents in the US, bilingual education in the home is fairly well accepted, and even kind of de riguer in certain circles (probably half the kids we play with in our Boston-area setting are bilingual), but there lingers a stigma that privileges certain languages over others. Your mother-in-law will brag to all the neighbors if your baby is learning French, for instance, but that kid down the block who speaks Spanish (as well as English) may well be seen as a potential problem for schools and society for her failure to assimilate. And while some innovative school districts have piloted two-way bilingual programs, many other districts have pushed for English-only learning as a means to help students succeed in English (even though these rules tend to raise dropout rates for immigrants and the children of immigrants).
So it's nice to see some scientific confirmation of what parents who speak two languages in the home already know: a mind is made nimbler the more it's exposed to. When it comes to languages and learning, more is more.
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