Bilingualism is marked by the ability to speak two languages. There are researchers that speculate that learning more than one language at a time can impede because it is deemed as too much for a child's brain (Lee et al., 2015). This essay will discuss the acquisition of learning a language in infants, an infant’s capabilities in learning more than one language, the cognitive benefits of being bilingual, and metalinguistic awareness. The development of children in speech is distinguished by certain sounds that are mimicked and learned across time. Language is learned primarily within the first three years of life (Ramirez et al., 2017). Research has recently indicated that infants learn rapidly from exposure to language, combining detections …show more content…
The neural responses of the dual sensitivity in the bilingual infant's brain are achieved by a slower transition from acoustic to phonetic sound analysis which is an adaptive and advantageous response to increased variability in language input (Ramirez et al., 2017). Ramirez and colleagues found the neural responses of bilingual infants “extend into the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex, which may be related to their previously described bilingual advantage in executive function skills” (Ramirez et al., 2017, p. 1). Limitations of the study include a small sample size and the languages analyzed were English and Spanish which could cause different results in relation to other languages. Ramirez and colleagues provide information that negates a common misconception of bilingual children being unable to process more than one language and shows the capabilities infants have when they are under six …show more content…
In assessing working memory the Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA) was used assigning four tasks varied in visuospatial working memory, verbal working memory, storage, and processing (Blom et al., 2014). To score the AWMA the Forward and Backward Digit Recall tasks and Dot Matrix task was used to test their visuospatial skills (Blom et al., 2014). Blom et al. found that bilingual children at the ages of five and six had less experience with Dutch than their monolingual counterparts (Blom et al., 2014). However, the bilingual in the Backward Digit Recall and Dot Matrix tasks performed excellent executive control showing cognitive gains visuospatial and verbal working memory tasks in comparison to the monolingual children (Blom et al., 2014). Despite the misconception that a child’s learning will be impeded by an additional language Blom and colleagues show that despite a lack of experience with terms, children who are bilingual have better visuospatial and verbal working