Are Bilingual Children Better Critical Thinkers?

Ludwig Wittgenstein said “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” and rightly so because the more languages one knows, the wider and hence more panoramic their cognitive horizons are. The same saying goes aptly for children who can speak more than one language. According to Whorf’s theory of ‘linguistic determinism’, an individual’s language determines the ways the individual’s minds creates categories, hence, diverse language patterns lead to different patterns in thought. Associating this theory to a child’s critical thinking abilities, makes us realize that naturally, a bilingual child having access to greater vocabularies and categories (in their known languages) in his brain, would have a wider scope of cognitive capabilities and clarity in the way he can express himself.

According to a study performed by Raymond T. Albert (2002), there was adequate evidence backing the presence of a curvilinear relationship between bilingualism and critical thinking temperament. Children between the critical periods of infancy to six years old, who are exposed to a second language while growing up are proven to have shown better academic records and excellent communicative skills than their monolingual counterparts. Research conducted in the University of Stanford in 2014 found that bilingual children scored higher in school tests and assessments throughout the entirety of their school careers.

Katherine Kinzler (2016) after carrying out an experiment, stated that even a fourteen to sixteen-month-old baby can who is brought up in a multilingual set-up already understands the importance of adopting another’s perspective of communication. Kids know exactly when to speak in a particular language and to whom. It is, hence, safe to say that the fundamental skills of interpersonal understanding are facilitated greatly with multilingual exposure. Bilingual children are competent creative thinkers and efficient problem-solvers, according to a study done in the University of Strathclyde’s School of Psychological Sciences and Health. Bilingual children scored much higher throughout the board in comparison to monolingual children, especially the questions that involved critical thinking skills. Bilinguals had an impressive ability to think outside the box which propelled them to work out answers to questions that others had difficulty coming up with answers to.

Bilingual children also tend to have greater emotional intelligence because of the way they can articulate and express a variety of their deepest emotions in many ways. This also gives them a better opportunity to conversing with more people and form deep connections with them. Moreover, they also displayed excellent inhibitory control which is the ability to ignore competing for perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input, according to Marian (2019), and were way better at paying attention in the classroom setting and had better task-switching capacities. Bilingualism also fosters admirable qualities like tolerance and acceptance, in a child. Just because it extensively facilitates cross-cultural communication, a child becomes more welcoming and tolerant towards other people’s cultural norms and genuinely respects them. Moreover, bilingual children as young as seven months can effectively change and adapt themselves according to their environmental changes.

Read more about Bilingualism here.