Bilingual people show increased activation in the brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition.
Bilingual people have more of these neurons and dendrites compared to people who speak only one language. This means that their grey matter is denser. Bilingualism also has an impact on white matter – that is, a system of nerve fibres which connect all four lobes of the brain.
This study played a large role in our understanding of multilingualism and the effects that it has on the brain. Since the late 1970s, researchers have found more cognitive benefits of bilingualism, including better attention, task-switching, and protection against aging declines.
Bilingual experience makes gray matter denser, so you have more cells. This is an indication of a healthier brain. Results from a study measuring gray-matter volumes in monolingual or bilingual undergraduates. Red areas indicate where gray-matter volumes were greater in one group versus the other.
Cognitive boosts, like improved attention and better multi-tasking, may come because bilingual people have both languages activated at the same time, and must continually monitor which one is appropriate. All that switching back and forth confers the mental benefits.
“When your brain processes language, it's not one place in the brain that processes language,” Marian says. “It's a network that's spread across all areas of the brain.” Because of that, bilingual brains have more pathways connecting different words, concepts and memories across different languages.
The main reason suggested for bilinguals' advantage is their need to process and manage the two languages, which are simultaneously activated whenever one of the languages is used [8,9,10,11]. This simultaneous activation requires a higher working memory (WM) capacity.
Learning a second language can protect against Alzheimer's as well. Recent brain studies have shown that bilingual people's brains function better and for longer after developing the disease.
Bilinguals often have a decreased vocabulary in both languages due to this. Especially if you aren't in constant contact with your first (or second) language, your vocabulary can suffer.
Summary: Speaking more than one language does not improve a person's general mental ability. However, while there is no cognitive advantage to being bilingual, there are broader social and lifestyle benefits that come from speaking multiple languages.
According to the study, when bilinguals speak in their second language, their brain inhibits their emotions and intuitions, prompting them to make more rational decisions in their second language.
A study conducted at the University of Granada and the University of York in Toronto, Canada, has revealed that bilingual children develop a better working memory -which holds, processes and updates information over short periods of time- than monolingual children.
Research suggests that as you learn or regularly use a second language, it becomes constantly “active” alongside your native language in your brain. To enable communication, your brain has to select one language and inhibit the other. This process takes effort and the brain adapts to do this more effectively.
The bilingual brain is used to handling two languages at the same time. This develops skills for functions such as inhibition (a cognitive mechanism that discards irrelevant stimuli), switching attention, and working memory.
Bilingualism strengthens cognitive abilities - bilingual people tend to be more creative and flexible. They can be more open-minded, and they also find it easier to focus on a variety of tasks simultaneously.
It seems that bilingual brains are multitasking all the time—even when they're speaking one language, they're constantly summoning vocabulary from both and choosing which to use. That constant practice helps keep brains nimble and allows bilingual people to juggle tasks more easily.
A person who knows two or more languages has a brain that looks, and works differently than the brain of a mono-lingual person. Compound Bilingual, Coordinate Bilingual, and subordinate bilinguals may all become fully proficient in a language.
Bilingual speakers have two minds in one body, new research has revealed. Speaking two languages literally changes the way we see the world, and bilingual speakers think differently to those who only use their native tongue.
This is because the language itself primes the bilinguals' culture-specific values, attitudes, and memories, which in turn affect that behavior (e.g., their responses to a questionnaire).
The effects of bilingualism on executive control circuits
For example, when performing non-linguistic switching tasks, early bilinguals recruit larger proportions of the left hemisphere brain areas related to language control, such as the left striatum and the left inferior frontal lobe, than do monolinguals82.
In the increasingly globalized and interconnected world, being able to communicate in more than one language is a highly marketable skill that often commands a higher salary. In fact, research shows that those who are bilingual or multilingual can earn 5%-20% more per hour than those who aren't.