Raising your child with more than one language is good: Evidence from statistical learning

06/25/2021

By Nadia Lana & Gwenyth Lu

Some parents worry that their children being exposed to multiple languages is confusing and will set them back at school. The opposite is true: knowing two or more languages has benefits like better reading skills and memory.

A study by Poepsel and Weiss (2016) investigated bilingualism and statistical learning. Statistical learning is the idea that babies use statistics when they are learning language. When babies hear sentences, it is hard for them to pick out each separate word, because unlike written language, spoken language does not have spaces between words. To break up the spoken sentences, babies use statistical skills to remember which syllables they have heard together in the past.

In their first experiment, Poepsel and Weiss (2016) compared monolingual English speaking university students with bilingual students that spoke either English and Chinese or English and Spanish. The students participated in an experimental paradigm where pictures and words were matched up in pairs (for example, a picture of an invented object and the label "barsh"), and certain pairs appeared more frequently. The more frequently a pair appeared, the stronger the association between that word and visual representation. This paradigm gives us insight on how we "map" information in our brains and make associations. This mapping ability, or ability to connect new words to their referents, is crucial for language acquisition. They found similar levels of performance in this task for both monolingual and bilingual students.

In their second experiment, they extended the paradigm by having some invented objects have multiple mappings. For example, both "barsh" and "lattle" now refer to the same object. New university students were recruited to complete the new paradigm, again both monolinguals and bilingual speakers. They found that bilingual speakers were significantly better at mapping the objects that had two labels. Bilinguals are used to complicated mapping: they need to remember, for example, that English "dog" and Chinese "狗 [gǒu]" both describe a four-legged pet, or that "tuna" means "fish" in English but "pear" in Spanish. Since they work harder to remember all of these associations, their brain is well trained at making maps.

This statistical map making is useful when a bilingual baby is listening to new sentences. It helps to make better assumptions about the structure of the sentence, and to recognize words. The more languages your child is exposed to, the better.

References

Poepsel, T. J., & Weiss, D. J. (2016). The influence of bilingualism on statistical word learning. Cognition, 152, 9-19.