The Bilingual world: a study on bilingualism and its cognitive effects

Abstract

Bilingualism has recently become a common condition, rather than an exception, that has impacted the world in various ways. The present research was designed to deeply analyze the effects of bilingualism on the contexts of linguistics, politics, and neurolinguistics. Collecting the substantial literature on this issue will permit us to contrast perspectives in order to obtain a wider understanding of the field of bilingualism. The research includes an introductory section covering the most important aspects regarding bilingualism and aims to define this linguistic condition, by recognizing three different kinds of bilingualism and studying their pros and cons. After this part, I analyze the two kinds of policies that governments choose to address bilingualism in countries and how one of them increases the chances individuals residing in the relevant countries will be bilingual. Next, I cover the most recent observations and conclusions by neurolinguists concerning bilingualism, which explain the differences between the monolingual and the bilingual brain, the process that enables the choice between the two languages without confusion and the collateral consequences that bilingualism has. Finally, I present an empirical study that I conducted with bilinguals of an L1 language and English as an L2, who were asked to answer a survey based on the information gathered in the previous, theoretical sections. Overall, I cover the interferences that bilingualism has on the mother tongue, the effectiveness of the cross-language activation that the brain develops and the age issue in the acquisition of languages.