The advantages of a bilingual brain - Being bilingual rewires your brain

The advantages of a bilingual brain - Being bilingual rewires your brain

Bilingual Brains are Better - The benefits of a bilingual brain

Bilingualism is the regular use of two fluent languages, and bilinguals are those individuals who need and use two (or more) languages in their everyday lives.[1] A person's bilingual memories are heavily dependent on the person's fluency, the age the second language was acquired, and high language proficiency to both languages.[2] High proficiency provides mental flexibility across all domains of thought and forces them to adopt strategies that accelerate cognitive development.[3] People who are bilingual integrate and organize the information of two languages, which creates advantages in terms of many cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, creativity, analogical reasoning, classification skills, problem solving, learning strategies, and thinking flexibility. (wikipedia)
One of the first researchers on the subject of bilingual memory and representation was linguist Uriel Weinreich. Languages in Contact, an essay published by Weinreich in 1953, proposed a model of bilingual memory organization that made the theoretical distinction between the lexical and conceptual level of representation.[4] Three different types of organizational models were proposed: coordinate, compound, and subordinate, each having a different relationship between the lexical and conceptual levels of representation.[4] In 1954, Ervin and Osgood reformulated Weinreich's compound-coordinate representational model and placed further emphasis on the context of language learning, similar to the encoding specificity principle later proposed by Tulving in the 1970s.[4] In 1984, Potter et al. proposed the hierarchical model of bilingual memory, consisting of two memory structures, the word association model and concept mediation model. The word association model proposes a link between languages at the lexical level while the concept mediation model proposes a direct link between the conceptual representation and the lexical representation in each language.[4] The hierarchical model was later revised by Kroll and Stewart in 1994 to account for linguistic proficiency and direction of translation, since then it has been re-revised.