Multilingualism – Assessing Benefits
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that being bilingual equalled being a second-class citizen. To make matters worse, the intelligence tests used in these studies were primarily phrased in the language that was more convenient for the researchers, which did not necessarily accommodate the testees (Wodniecka op. cit.). It was only with Elizabeth Peal and Wallace Lambert’s seminal 1962 study that this prevailing unfavourable outlook on the mental abilities of bilinguals was reversed. Surprisingly at the time, in a comparison of two carefully selected groups of children, the bilingual ones significantly outperformed monolinguals on the majority of both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests. In the boom of studies that followed, bilinguals have been found to outscore individuals speaking more than only one language on a variety of tasks measuring flexibility in thinking and effectiveness of attention, and focusing on one thing while ignoring others.
3. Bilingual speakers’ verbal abilities One difference between the child who grew up bilingual and the post-pubescent acquirer of another language is the lag time in switching between languages, which implies differences in the speed of access of the relevant linguistic representations. Some researchers (e.g. Kuhl 2004) also believe that children who have not been exposed to more than one language by the age of one, lose the ability to distinguish between the phonemes of their vernacular and other languages, hypothesising that from then on the brain hones in on sounds of the mother tongue and battles against alien pronunciations. Barring these considerations, many of the findings from studies on ‘naturalistic’ bilinguals have been confirmed by research focusing on learners in the foreign language classroom context. Just as ‘it is through comparison that one becomes aware of one’s own culture, much of which is unconscious and taken-for-granted’ (Byram 1997: 113), children and older persons learning foreign languages have been demonstrated to have enhanced metalingual abilities (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow 1990; Ewert 2006, 2008), that is, a keener awareness of the language’s meaning and structure (manifested for instance in the detection of anomalous sentences (Bialystok 2001) or judging how many words there are in a sentence, whatever the practical utility of this skill). Foreign language learning ‘enhances children’s understanding of how language itself works and their ability to manipulate language in the