Language boost

Parents who use different languages with their children might give them better cognitive powers Bilingual children are less easily confused and are less likely to develop Alzheimer's when they grow up.

These are just some of the claims to emerge from recent studies on bilingualism which the American scientist and author Jared Diamond has reviewed for an article in the journal Science.

Globally, people who speak two or more languages are believed to outnumber those who speak only one language. But up until the 1960s, research appeared to show that bilingual children acquired language more slowly.

According to Professor Diamond, who is now learning his 12th language, such assumptions are now outdated, with more recent work suggesting no great differences in the cognitive and linguistic progress of multilingual vs monolingual children.

But there are areas, he says, where more languages might be better.

Puppet show

He points to work by Ágnes Kovács and Jacques Mehler. They tested the responses of infants who were being brought up by parents who each spoke different languages to their children, with infants who were only exposed to one parental language.

What they found was the "bilingual" children adjusted more quickly to changes, and were more quickly anticipating on which side of the screen the puppet would appear based on the speech clue.

They devised a game with a puppet appearing on different sides of a screen, but with the puppet's appearance preceded by a different nonsense word.