Speaking Two Languages Also Benefits Low-income Children

From http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-languages-benefits-low-income-children.html

Speaking two languages also benefits low-income children
August 27, 2012

In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Pascale Engel de Abreu of the University of Luxembourg and colleagues examine the effects of speaking two languages on the executive functioning of low-income children. "Low-income children represent a vulnerable population," says Engel de Abreu. "Studying cognitive processes in this population is of great societal importance and represents a significant advancement in our understanding of childhood development."

Although the bilingual children knew fewer words than their monolingual peers, and did not show an advantage for representation tasks, they performed better on the control tasks than did the monolingual children, just as the researchers hypothesized.

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