Bilingual people may be better equipped to learn new languages than those who only speak one language, finds a study in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Researchers monitored the brains of bilingual Mandarin- and English-speaking college students and students, who spoke only English as they learned an artificial language. By the end of the first day of training, bilingual students’ brains showed a brain-wave pattern typically found when native speakers process their language. Monolingual students’ brains only began to exhibit the brain-wave pattern by the last day of training.