Speaking another language brings many changes to the way our brain functions, from decision-making to memory to creativity. Now, researchers have found that people who speak two languages may be better at switching their attention from one thing to another compared to those who only speak one, focusing on the most relevant information.

Today, most of the world’s population speaks at least two languages. In Europe, for example, over half of the population claims to be bilingual. Many studies have looked at the features of the brains of multilingual people. Their brains store memories differently, process all familiar languages simultaneously and show boosted creativity and divergent thinking.

Researchers at the University of Florida studied the differences between bilingual and monolingual people when it comes to attentional control and ignoring information that was not important at the time. They found bilingual people are more efficient at ignoring information that’s irrelevant, rather than suppressing or inhibiting information.

“One explanation for this is that bilinguals are constantly switching between two languages and need to shift their attention away from the language not in use,” study author Grace deMeurisse said in a news release. For example, if a person that speaks in Spanish and English is talking in one language, the other one is on hold but still active.

The perks of speaking two languages

In their study, deMeurisse and her team explored differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers by using a task that hadn’t been used before in psycholinguistics. It’s called a partial repetition cost task, and it allows us to measure people’s abilities to deal with incoming information and control their attention.

In this study, participants were given three sets of stimuli to observe which include arrows or colored squares. They were asked to select one of two options based on the first and then the third stimulus observed. The middle stimulus provided information that was not needed or unhelpful for completing the task.

They worked with functional monolinguals and bilinguals. The first group are people who had two years or less of foreign language experience in a classroom and only use the first language they learned as a child, while the second ones are people who learned their first and second languages before the age of 9 and still use both languages.

“We found that bilinguals seem to be better at ignoring information that’s irrelevant,” Edith Kaan, study author, said in a news release. She explained that an individual’s cognitive traits continuously adapt to external factors, in this case to being bilingual.
“If you stop using the second language, your cognition may change as well,” she added.

The study, the researchers said, shows the need to build more consistency among the experiments used to understand the differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. Linguistics tend to use different methods, which may explain why some studies have said differences between monolinguals and bilinguals aren’t so pronounced.

The researchers also said that the study wasn’t intended to show that people who speak two or more languages have an advantage over those who speak one. However, they said, learning a second language “is always going to be something that can benefit people,” deMeurisse said, whether benefits are cognitive, social or environmental.

The study was published in the journal Bilingualism.