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Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Judith Kroll of Penn State University provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the bilingual mind.
Judith Kroll is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Women's Studies and Director of the Center for Language Science at Penn State University. She has published numerous articles on the cognitive processes that underlie language, communication, and bilingualism.
Learn more about Dr. Kroll and the research conducted in her Penn State University lab.
Dr. Judith Kroll - The Bilingual Brain
Until recently, researchers assumed that monolingual speakers were the model subjects of study. Bilinguals were considered a special group of language users, much like patients with brain injury. In the past 20 years, this situation has changed dramatically with the realization that bilingualism is common in many places in the world. Bilinguals provide a unique opportunity to understand the way that language may shape the mind and the brain.
What have we learned? Contrary to the belief that young children will be confused by exposure to more than one language, the research shows that exposure to two languages from birth enables children to recognize and distinguish speech in both languages. Bilingual children also benefit relative to monolingual children, particularly in tasks that require what I'll call mental juggling - taking different perspectives, ignoring information, and switching from one task to the next.
At the Penn State Center for Language Science, we are studying young adult bilinguals and collaborating with researchers elsewhere in the world to understand how bilinguals speak their two languages and how that experience produces benefits for cognition and the brain. We have shown that the two languages are always active. This activity puts the two languages in competition but the cost of that competition is small relative to the benefits it appears to hold. When bilinguals speak with other bilinguals, they easily slip in and out of both languages, often selecting the word or phrase from the language that most clearly expresses their thoughts. Although both languages may be on the tip of their tongue, bilinguals rarely make a wrong choice. For a bilingual, selecting the language to speak is a form of mental exercise. The more exercise you get, the better off your brain may be as you age. So the bottom line is that bilingualism is good for you and it's probably not too late to start now!