Lack of Attention and Focus? Be Bilingual!

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism: an enhanced ability to maintain attention and focus.

The results of a study suggest that a bilingual brain has an improved attentional control.

Bilinguals have cognitive advantages over those who only speak one language, but the nature of the advantage is unclear. They possess enhanced attentional control abilities and are better able to concentrate on a specific stimulus.

The study recruited 48 highly proficient English-Chinese bilingual, who had learned English before the age of 10 and switch between languages on a daily basis, and 51 were English monolingual speakers. The important measure was the time it took participants to respond to the stimuli presented in the tests on a computer screen. The novelty of the study was to examine slow response times separately from fast response times. 

These results suggest that bilingual speakers have better sustained attention than monolingual speakers have. The lifetime task of switching between languages appears to enhance the ability to maintain attention.

The next challenge is to determine how these behavioural changes affect the brain. 

We already known that the experience of speaking another language changes the structure of the brain and its functions. However, we do not understand very well how these changes lead to changes in behaviour.