The Benefits of Being Bilingual — Test 6, Passage 3
IELTS_ACADEMIC · Ielts Reading Passage · Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic, Cambridge University Press
You should spend about 20 minutes on this passage.
Test: Observing the ___ of Russian-English bilingual people when asked to select certain objects Findings: Bilingual people engage both languages simultaneously: a mechanism known as ___ Test: A test called the ___ , focusing on naming colours Findings: Bilingual people are more able to handle tasks involving a skill called ___ Test: A test involving switching between tasks Findings: When changing strategies, bilingual people have superior ___
IELTS_READING_SUMMARY_COMPLETION
NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Benefits of Being Bilingual
IELTS_READING_YES_NO_NOT_GIVEN
YES
In the past, people thought that bilingual children may be less intelligent than monolingual children.
NOT GIVEN
People who are bilingual may find it harder to learn a third language than monolingual people find it to learn a second language.
NO
Bilingualism can result in a delay in the onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
NO
Bilingual people with Alzheimer's disease have been found to have fewer physical signs of the disease than monolingual people with the same condition.
NOT GIVEN
The majority of people in the world are bilingual.
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the passage? Write YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer, NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer, or NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.
IELTS_READING_MATCHING_INFORMATION
The bilingual advantage may improve the ability to learn new sounds.
Bilinguals may be able to learn a new language more quickly than monolinguals.
The bilingual advantage may help in situations where people have to stop focusing on one piece of information and switch to another.
The bilingual advantage is apparent even in very young children.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
The passage has seven paragraphs, A–G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A–G. NB You may use any letter more than once.
Paragraphs
According to the latest figures, the majority of the world's population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual.
Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we don't hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain's language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear 'can', you will likely activate words like 'candy' and 'candle' as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called 'language co-activation', comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to 'pick up a marker' from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn't know Russian, because the Russian word for 'stamp', marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, 'marker'. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language.
Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase 'tip-of-the-tongue states', when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word's font. When the colour and the word match (i.e., the word 'red' printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don't match (i.e., the word 'red' printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself ('red') and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.
It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners' neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound's fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception.
Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focussing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.
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