Bilingual Children: Experts Determine What Makes Bilingual Babies Smarter

Bilingual children have more brain activity and experts have determined what part of the brain makes them smarter. Bilingual babies develop a kind of flexibility that becomes capable of honing their cognitive abilities. Thus, they are mentally sharper at problem-solving and focusing, a new study has discovered.

The study was published in the journal Developmental Science and was led by Naja Ferjan Ramirez. It looked into 16 babies at the age of 11 months who are from English-Spanish households.

The researchers wanted to find out if bilingual babies, who have yet to learn to talk, manifest the effects of what it's like to be raised in a multilingual family. The babies were made to listen to different speech sounds in different languages while a magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner tracked the nerve activities in their brains.

Our researcher Naja Ferjan Ramirez talks about how babies learn two languages, based on her latest brain study! https://t.co/skRvEKGvO3

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Bilingual Children And Their Brain's Executive Function

The findings revealed that bilingual babies responded better to the sounds. Nerve activity in their brain's executive function, which has the prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex, was more active compared to monolingual babies or those raised in English-only households.

This executive function of the brain determines cognitive ability, which involves memory and problem-solving skills. The researchers pointed out that at age 11 months, babies generally begin to disregard foreign language sounds, when this used to be heightened at six months.

However, the brains of bilingual babies become "highly adaptive" or flexible as they get used to hearing mixed languages. "Babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay 'open' to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers," said co-study author Patricia Kuhl, via Science Focus.

Bilingual Children's Sharper Cognitive Development

"[Our study] suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally," said Ferjan Ramirez via Science Alert. The findings are in line with previous studies that support the advantages of teaching different languages to children early. Watch the researchers explain their study further in the video below: