Bilingualism Essay

Landau, Elizabeth. “2 languages make your brain buff.” CNN. CNN, 18 Feb. 2011.

Web. 10 Feb 2014.

In this online blog entry, Elizabeth Landau claims that bilingualism can be very beneficial to one’s cognitive abilities. Her first sub-claim is that bilinguals retain better cognitive function as the body grows older. The grounds for this sub-claim is a reference to Ellen Bialystok’s study on Alzheimer’s patients revealing that bilinguals were several years older than monolinguals at similar phases of neurological impairment. The findings from this study support Landau’s main claim because it shows that bilinguals’ cognitive abilities regressed at a much slower pace than those of monolinguals’. The work of Bialystok is credible since she is affiliated with York University in Toronto, Ontario, and the research that Landau refers to in this blog entry are all from presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Landau’s second sub-claim is that bilinguals are better at multitasking. She supports this sub-claim with Judith Kroll’s research that has found bilinguals better suited to multitasking because of their heightened attention skills. This is most likely because bilinguals are perpetually inhibiting one language in favor of the other, which gives them an enhanced ability to tune out irrelevant information. Once again, these grounds are credible and scholarly because Judith Kroll is a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, and like Bialystok, Kroll presented these findings at the annual conference. More importantly, Landau uses Bialystok’s research for support because the multitasking skills found among bilinguals correlate with improved cognitive abilities. The warrant here is that mult...

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...rough language after being unable to become multilingual due to apartheid, and de Houwer mentions how children become bilingual mainly because their environment is bilingual. For Noah, his world forced him to be monolingual despite being raised by multilingual parents. The credibility of this source is questioned since a comedian’s job is to make the audience laugh, not necessarily to tell the truth. It would help if these stories came from a biographical source to see if they are factual. The stories may be suspicious but the ideas presented in his performance are reasonable and not farfetched. More than anything, this primary source gives me a more personal account of the impact of language. I intend to use this source with de Houwer’s to show how raising a bilingual child is much easier and effective than letting one search for his or her identity as a grown man.