The recent New York Times’ article Why Bilinguals are Smarter discusses how being bilingual can not only give you an intellectual benefit, but it can even delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease later in life.

Because your brain has to reconcile two different languages when you’re bilingual, it’s constantly exercising cognitive function skills and improving your executive function.

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

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Studies have shown that bilinguals can solve certain mental puzzles better than monolinguals, and are quicker to adapt to environmental changes. Bilingualism has even shown to be effective in babies as young as 7 months of age:

In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.

Even if you haven’t started teaching your child a second language yet, “The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).”

Mr. Bee and I attended a birthday party this weekend, and we were surprised to find that most of the parents in attendance were speaking exclusively Chinese to their children, and some of them weren’t even Chinese! It really got us thinking about how we haven’t made teaching Charlie a second language enough of a priority.

The intellectual advantages of being bilingual are important to us, as is maintaining our cultural ties through language. I’d previously heard, and mistakenly believed, that learning a second language delayed speech. But apparently children as young as Charlie know how to distinguish different languages spoken in the home. I suppose we put off teaching him a second and third language because I can speak Korean, Mr. Bee can speak Japanese, and we only speak English to each other. But the benefits of bilingualism are something that we can’t afford to ignore much longer!

Are you raising a bilingual child? What are you doing to teach your child a second language?