SDLC 105 Learning Journal 9

[Rosa M. Colon]

It seems that the question of whether or not bilingualism makes a person smarter or not has been a controversial topic throughout the years.  However, based on the articles there truly is no definitive answer being that it depends on one's own definition of intelligence.  While a bilingual individual may struggle during childhood constructing two different vocabularies, researchers suggest that they are able to make up for this hindrance later in life because there are long-term cognitive benefits of being bilingual.  Although bilinguals experience a lot more interference with switching between language, the brain is able to take this frequent interference and use it to strengthen cognitive functioning.  Overall, this is not to necessarily say that bilingual individuals are smarter than monolingual individuals, however bilinguals do seem to reap some benefits from knowing more than one language.