Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Bilingualism sharpens the brain, helps resist Alzheimer’s disease...

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As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

 But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important. Full story...

Don't miss:
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  4. Low-caste Dalits in India build a temple ... to the English language!!!
  5. Watch the translation!!! Hilarious...
  6. Proficiency in English around the world.  
  7. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew admits that bilinguism policy was a serious mistake... 

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