Is Early Bilingualism an Advantage for Children’s Development Under Age 12?

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211220.023How to use a DOI?

Keywords

bilingualism; children’s development; language acquisition

Abstract

Recently, learning more than one language becomes more and more prevalent worldwide. Therefore, people questioned whether dual language development is beneficial or not and what is the best age to start learning a second language. Previous studies have found that there is a critical age for language acquisition around age 12. Thus, this paper is going to answer the question that whether early bilingualism is an advantage for children’s development under age 12. In the review of the empirical data from the literature on comparisons between early bilingual and monolingual children’s both cognitive and linguistic development. It was found that learn a second language help improve some components of executive control system, whereas there is no significant difference between early bilinguals and monolinguals’ language abilities before early adolescence. Generally, the earlier children learn a second language the more exposure and proficiency they will have for both languages. Thus, better cognitive performance they will have later in life. However, those evidence lacks power and controls over confounding variables such as SES and cultural differences, which may be the alternative explanation for those facilitative responses.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jinghan Ruan
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/12/24
TI  - Is Early Bilingualism an Advantage for Children’s Development Under Age 12?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 134
EP  - 138
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.023
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.023
ID  - Ruan2021
ER  -