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Final Report

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Recommended: Demerits of bilingualism

The topic of this final report is ‘What is bilingualism? Are two languages better than one?’. In one of the previous presentations given by my peers, bilingualism was considered as a blessing for it has cognitive advantages. They argued that the ascendancy of bilingualism in the cognitive aspect outweigh the potential disadvantages they may face. When compared to the monolinguals, although bilinguals may fall between two stools with their relatively limited vocabulary in each language, it was contended that such vocabulary difference is indeed minor and is generally confined to conversational words, the language deficiency in their major language will also be offset eventually for the bilinguals can learn how to translate words into equivalents …show more content…

Their arguments for the cognitive advantages of bilingualism were well-justified. They stated that bilinguals usually do better in multitasking than heir monolingual counterparts, and they are good at attentional control as they are used to be aware of which language should they use in different contexts as well as their choice of words. That is to say that bilinguals are able to slip in and out of both languages smoothly and select the phrases which can most express their thoughts. They further explained that bilinguals can think ore comprehensively, pick things up faster than monolinguals and understand complex ideas better by exposure to both their first and second language. Their arguments were supported by a study funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health. The results showed that bilinguals have two distinct sets of language rules in mind, that they know how to switch their way of thinking depending on the circumstances, and this behavior of switching between distinctive thinking modes is an indicator of their ability to multi-task (National Institutes of Health, …show more content…

They tried to state the potential disadvantages of bilingualism that by demonstrating the distribution of time of bilinguals are insufficient. This claim was invalid as it has been proven that time needed of bilinguals for processing to access the ‘right word’ is indeed by milliseconds (Bialystok, Luk, Peets &Yang, 2010). And they also mentioned that for particular words which can be used in one context only, bilinguals may face the risk of having difficulties to express their thoughts in another language, specifically their second language. As aforementioned, bilinguals are able to translate the words they need in expressing themselves into the equivalent phrase or sentence in their other language (Bialystok, Luk, Peets & Yang, 2010), it would not cause word deficit as they described. For the above reasons, I found their explanation on the potential demerits of bilingualism

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