Researchers from Canada’s Concordia and York universities have published a study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology showing that bilingual toddlers have a cognitive edge over their monolingual peers.
The study shows that youngsters exposed to a second language from an early age outperformed unilingual kids on attention-related tasks.
This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals’ extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used.
