It is said that more than half of the population of the world is bilingual, meaning they know how to speak two languages. I am bilingual, and I wanted to know what the benefits are of being bilingual, other than being able to communicate in two different languages. I want to know if knowing two or more languages helps your brain grow, or if it makes you smarter than the average monolingual person. I feel like being bilingual might give your brain an advantage when it comes to learning new things, so I did some research to see if my hunch was right or not.

There is an article that examines how learning two languages affects processing things better and how it affects various aspects of cognition. Recent studies involving young kids in the article have indicated that early bilingualism can alter the functional involvement of certain brain areas in the performance of executive control tasks, and induces experience-related change in the brain structure. So when people do multiple tasks at once, bilingual people use less part of their brain, while monolinguals (people who only speak one language) have to use both sides of their brain to transition from one task to another. This study concludes that it is easier for bilinguals to do more than one task at once compared to monolinguals because they have to use less of their brain to do the task, which pretty much means it is less tiring for them.

I also found an article in the New York Times that addresses this topic. The article talks about a study in 2004 from psychologist Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee. This study asked bilingual and monolingual preschoolers to sort blue circles and red squares presented to them on a computer screen into bins. The children had to sort the shapes by color, and both groups did this task successfully. Next, the children were told to sort them by shape, even if the blue shape was supposed to go in the red bin. This made it more challenging because some of the shapes had to go in the bins that weren’t the same color as the shapes. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.

More studies on bilingual people have suggested that being bilingual improves the brain’s executive function. The executive function is a command system in your brain that directs the attention processes that we use for problem solving and performing mentally demanding tasks.
The psychologists that are doing these studies believe that the difference between bilinguals and monolinguals is the ability to monitor the environment. Being bilingual requires people to keep track of the changes around them, like when they have to quickly decide what language is appropriate to use at specific times.

To summarize, the first study concludes that bilingual people are better at performing multiple tasks at once, and the second study concludes that bilinguals are quicker at performing tasks that are mentally demanding. After reviewing these two articles, I can conclude that being bilingual will make you smarter than being monolingual in the comparison of being able to know your surroundings and with context of how to multitask. If you have any new thoughts or contradicting ideas on this subject, please comment below, I would love to hear a new perspective on this topic!