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A. All this is hot evidence for a mental exercise that could give children a lifelong advantage. Should you then sign your child up for whatever language you can find? Alas, no. Multiple languages are best for you when you’ve had them from birth.
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B. Johnson’s own nipper is still pre-verbal at nearly 18 months, meaning that every request not immediately understood may quickly turn into a piercing shriek. But we take comfort that Johnson, junior, is cognitively just fine.
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C. But other studies find no vocabulary shortfall in either language. In short, there is little evidence that raising a child bilingual will hurt their primary language.
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D. If his language comes a little late, that is probably because, for one thing, he is male, and for another, he is surrounded every day by three languages: English and Danish at home, and German at nursery. More confusingly still, the three languages are closely related: is it bread, Brot or brød? The earthy words in English are mostly Germanic, meaning these triplets are coming up in his world all the time.
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E. This is probably because monitoring the use of two languages is itself an exercise in executive function. Such studies control for socio-economic status, and in fact the same beneficial effects have been shown in bilingual children of poor families. Finally, the effects appear to be lifelong: bilinguals have later onset of Alzheimer’s disease, on average, than do monolinguals.
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F. Children raised bilingual or multilingual show similar results. In early days they will mix languages. They make errors by using the syntax of one language and the words of another. (“Touch the guitar”, my Spanish teacher’s daughter would say, instead of “Play the guitar”.)
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G. Many parents once believed that a second language was a bad idea, as it would interfere with developing the first one. But such beliefs are out of date today. Some studies seem to show that bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language (at early stages) than monolinguals do.
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H. The benefits, by contrast, are both strong and long-lasting. Bilingual children as young as seven months outperform monolinguals at tasks requiring “executive function”: prioritising and planning complex tasks and switching mental gears.
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I. THIS weekend Johnson enjoyed an American holiday in Berlin: the children’s Halloween party held by neighbours, a half-German, half-American couple. Besides mermaid tails or monster horns, nearly every nipper at the party had another accessory: a second language.
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J. But these problems disappear quickly. By three or four, children reliably separate the languages, knowing which can be spoken with whom. Their fluency in each would be the envy of any adult language-learner.
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