Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

From a great article on the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon by Dan Vergano at

www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-10-18-tip-tongue_N.htm

It’s mostly about bilingual sign language speakers, but he’s got a bit of interesting data on bilingual people:

Pyers and other have shown that people who speak more than one language possess advantages that make a difference, beyond just fluency in another tongue.

In the current Cognition, for example, a study led by Albert Costa of Spain’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, finds that “when the task at hand recruits a good deal of monitoring resources, bilinguals outperform monolinguals.”

In other words, multiple language speakers possess a better attention span for hard tasks. And they seem to be better at switching their focus from one task to the next, a real advantage in our era of multi-tasking emails, cellphones and occupations.

“The explanation is that they practice controlling their languages, repressing one at the expense of the other, constantly,” Pyers says. “So they are just better at controlling their focus.” Turns out, you just have to practice paying attention, too.