Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. How does this work - do you understand it?Ī. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. You then follow that road.īut on one question, there was a difference. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. But it was close enough.Īs a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. How did you begin studying bilingualism?Ī.
An edited version of the two conversations follows. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone.
Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind.