Introduction
Bilingualism and multilingualism are among the major trends among populations in the 21st century. The ability to speak two or more languages proficiently is an added advantage in the educational, business and developmental platforms. Among adults and children, bilingualism and multilingualism are outstanding characteristics that make the groups stand out compared to monolinguals. Parents have shown an increasing interest in exposing their children to multilingualism from a young age. Overall, multilingualism and bilingualism is associated with various advantages over monolingualism. Most notably, there is a substantial difference in brain development between monolingual and bilingual/multilingual children. Various studies have been conducted to establish whether there is an advantage in mental development that could be realized when a child is bilingual or multilingual. Most studies have shown that monolingual children have more developed brain sections, better thinking capacities, memories, communication skills, and socialization skills. Bilingualism and multilingualism, therefore, contributes to more excellent thinking capability among students, enhance their social skills, ability to communicate, and express and understand feelings compared to monolingualism.
Literature Review
Multilingualism and bilingualism often contribute to the development of the brain’s superior frontal and parietal regions. Bilingual and multilingual children, therefore, have more developed brains than their monolingual counterparts. According to Pliatsikas et al. (2020), monolingual children’s frontal cortex is relatively smaller and less developed than that of multilingual children. The other parts of the brain also have a developmental disparity that brings about notable capacity and cognitive capabilities. Therefore, Multilingual and bilingual children have a considerable advantage over the monolingual counterparts, courtesy of their more developed brain structures. To promote brain structure development, parents and teachers should help children get bilingual or multilingual opportunities from a tender age to grant them the advantages bilingualism grants various individuals in the community.
Bilingual and multilingual children have relatively higher mental capability with superior thinking skills than their monolingual counterparts. Booton et al. (2021) point out that bilingualism enables children to develop unique abilities that promote their intelligence. According to scholars, children fluent in two or more languages can pay attention to important matters while filtering any non-important competing thoughts they have. Resultantly, they can think in a way that generates creative ideas, depicting their outstanding intelligence capabilities. On the other hand, monolingual children can hardly think while distinguishing perpetual competing information from constructive ones. Hence, the level of creativity in their thinking tends to be relatively low. Multilingualism creates the advantage by bringing two or more perspectives on the child at any given moment and supporting them to develop a unique ability to merge the two perspectives to develop a superior idea.
Superior communication skills is another crucial aspect often observed in multilingual children. Through bilingualism, children develop outstanding mental confidence to express themselves more clearly. On the same note, bilingualism enables a child speak in two or more languages, which benefits their ability to understand information shared in either language. According to Sun et al. (2020), children’s ability to understand more than one language puts them in a better position to socially interact with different individuals and, hence, have significantly higher social skills than their monolingual counterparts. Similarly, multilingual individuals tend to have a greater ability to engage people of different social groups. Thus, when a child is a child is bilingual, they are in a much better social position, as they can easily interact with others from different backgrounds and bring about their multicultural understanding in their interactions with peers from different backgrounds.
Understanding and expression are crucial qualities that children struggle with. Multilingualism has been fronted as one of the solution approaches to the problem. Multilingualism is associated with better understanding of personal and others’ feelings. Besides, multilingual children express their feelings in a way that do not cause too much tension (Cobb-Clark et al., 2021). Compared to their monolingual counterparts, multilingual children brilliantly express how they feel, which suggests that their mental development and behavioral control are superior. Overall, children in the 21st century have more multilingualism opportunities and could contribute to a generally better expression of how they feel and appropriate control of their behavior compared to the predominantly monolingual children of the previous generation. Furthermore, since multilingualism promotes the development of the brain to contain greater social and communication skills, multilingual can communicate their opinions and demands more clearly and appealingly than their monolingual counterparts.
Additionally, bilingualism constitutes brain development in the memory capacity dimension. Children who speak more than one language tend to have better memories than their counterparts who speak just one language (Brito et al., 2020). The more developed brain structures create room for multilingual children to retain most of the information they retain. As children learn two or more languages, their brains develop to sustain a lot of information. Similarly, due to the ability to concentrate, they can filter out what is important from the large chunk of information they receive from the environment, hence an enhanced memory.
Research Question: How does bilingualism and multilingualism impact brain development compared to a monolingual child?
Method
This study used a secondary research design to answer the research question. After obtaining the background information on the topic and establishing a research question, the study proceeded to identify the research data sources. A total of six published articles containing relevant information on the topic were selected for use for the research. A keyword search was used to obtain the research articles. The study focused on obtaining quality, reliable and up to date research articles to ensure the highest accuracy of the information included. The selected data sources were verified for accuracy and reliability before obtaining the research information.
Data Collection
The research data was collected using pen and paper, and the relevant and useful information from the sources was recorded. Multiple data sources were used to obtain the data to ensure a variety and a large data volume to enable analysis of the study information.
Study Limitations
The sole limitation of the research data collection was that only six articles were used to obtain the study results. Therefore, the study lacked the required variety, which could influence the reliability of the final report of the research.
Results
The study discovered much about the interrelationship between children’s brain development and bilingualism and multilingualism. First, the research found that bilingualism/multilingualism supports superior brain structure development for children. Secondly, the study connected various behavioural and cognitive skills to the brain structure development. It was found that social communication, memory, thinking, emotional understanding, and expression among children are much better among multilingual and bilingual children than among monolingual children. Besides, the research found that children in the present-day community have better exposure to multilingualism, contributing to their better brain development than children in the previous generations who were mostly monolingual.
Analysis
The research data was analyzed using content analysis and thematic analysis methods. Both the analysis methods aimed to obtain a high level of accuracy and reliability of the report published from the research findings. Data from different sources were compared, and only the most consistent data was included in the study. The data was also categorized into various themes to aid in the organization of the research findings. The literature review information and research hypothesis guided the simple content and thematic analyses methods.
Discussion
The realization of multilingualism and bilingualism and its benefits on child development continues to expand worldwide. In the multicultural environment in which people live today, bilingualism is a common trend for almost all children. Children’s digital games and videos also gain them access to many new languages. As a result. Today, many children are multilingual as opposed to their older counterparts, who had no bilingual opportunities and grew monolingual. While the trend of multilingualism expands worldwide, a significant impact on brain development has been noted. Multilingualism stacks children’s brains with a lot of information to keep. Language development is one of the most challenging things multilingual children encounter. Despite their learning to speak challenges, they gain many advantages, especially with their structural development (Pliatsikas et al., 2020). The load expected of a bilingual child’s brain is almost twice as the load their monolinguals have to encounter. Language is a part and parcel of culture, implying that the bilinguals also learn two cultures simultaneously. Although they may be inclined more toward one culture or language, they also develop a background for the other culture. Various brain structures respond to the heavy demand by becoming more developed than monolingual brains that do not have too much weight to bear. At a tender age, some parts of the multilingual children’s brains become larger and superior to the monolingual children’s brains. The modification is aimed to help them sustain the information they receive, which later influences how the children think, communicate, express their behaviors, socialize and memory retention and recall capability (Kereša et al., 2021).
The superior brain structures children develop due to multilingualism and bilingualism gradually impact most of their cognitive engagements. Most notably, multilinguals and bilinguals have a high-level thinking capability than their monolingual counterparts (Booton et al., 2021). The research has established that bilinguals ‘ level of concentration is outstanding. They also gave access to a lot of information, which they can process to give rise to very creative ideas that an average monolingual can give. Due to better brain development, bilingual children can navigate through the ideas they have in mind and select what is important from the whole chunk. Eventually, the ideas their brains process to be useful tend to be more creative. Hence, their intelligence displays may be a lot more than their monolingual counterparts’ intelligence level.
Various superior brain structures among bilingual children also shape their communication. Children become more aware of their environment than their monolingual counterparts, who can only understand a part of their environment that is associated with the language they understand. Children’s communication is a lot dependent on the level in which they know their respective environments. Thus, the more languages they can understand, the more superior communication they can display because of a more rounded understanding of their respective environments. On the same note, there is a significant children’s awareness of socialization abilities when they know more than one language (Sun et al., 2020). The present-day community is characterized by multiculturalism. Thus, when a child knows two or more languages, they already have some multicultural characteristics that enable them to interact comfortably with others from other cultures. As a result, a notable socialization superiority may be notable. Besides, the socialization capabilities of a child are more or less shaped by how well they understand their surrounding. Due to multilingual children’s superior understanding of the environment, their socialization behaviors are also superior to that of their monolingual counterparts. A much better behavioral and feeling understanding and expression is also often realized among multilingual children. Since they have a better understanding of the social environment and superior cognitive capability, multilingual children understand their feelings and manage them appropriately, hence a better expression. They tend to intergrade the multiple perspectives they understand in their contemporary behavioural expression, making them better at showing how they feel than the monolingual children (Cobb-Clark et al., 2021).
Conclusion
Bilingualism, therefore, earns children a brain development advantage over the monolingual counterparts. Bilingual and multilingual children develop superior brain structures capable of handling and processing a lot of information to deliver creative thinking superior to that of a monolingual child. All the operations involving cognition tend to be better in multilingual children than in their monolingual counterparts. Parents and other stakeholders should seek bilingual and multilingual opportunities for the children to ensure superior brain development and consequent brain operational effectivity.
References
Booton, S. A., Hoicka, E., O’Grady, A. M., Chan, H. Y. N., & Murphy, V. A. (2021). Children’s divergent thinking and bilingualism. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 41, 100918.
Brito, N. H., Greaves, A., Leon-Santos, A., Fifer, W. P., & Noble, K. G. (2020). Associations between bilingualism and memory generalization during infancy: Does socioeconomic status matter? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(2), 231–240. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728920000334
Cobb-Clark, D. A., Harmon, C., & Staneva, A. (2021). The bilingual gap in children’s language, emotional, and pro-social development. IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 10(1).
Kereša, M., Živić, T., & Kolar, E. B. (2021). BILINGUAL CHILDREN’S COMMUNICATION SKILLS: AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH. language, 13, 14.
Pliatsikas, C., Meteyard, L., Veríssimo, J., DeLuca, V., Shattuck, K., & Ullman, M. T. (2020). The effect of bilingualism on brain development from early childhood to young adulthood. Brain Structure and Function, 225(7), 2131-2152.
Sun, H., Yussof, N. T. B., Mohamed, M. B. B. H., Rahim, A. B., Bull, R., Cheung, M. W., & Cheong, S. A. (2018). Bilingual language experience and children’s social-emotional and behavioral skills: a cross-sectional study of Singapore preschoolers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
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