Raising Children Bilingual: Should We, and When?

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2003, Vol 48(5), 667-669. Reviews the book, Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy, and Cognition by Ellen Bialystok (see record 2001-01047-000). It is contended that misconceptions abound in our society about raising children bilingual. Folk wisdom and educational policy both present childhood bilingualism negatively despite scientific evidence to the contrary. “Bilingualism in Development” demonstrates clearly the advantages of being bilingual early on, from early development of phonological awareness to quantity judgment, from literacy to problem solving, and from cognitive to personality benefits. Most current theories of psycholinguistics are built on studies of language processing in adults, and most developmental theories of language are built on what we know about children's learning in monolingual contexts. Bilingualism in Development takes us beyond this divide to a formidable task of children's learning of two or more languages early on. In this book Bialystok does a beautiful job in instilling the latest theories and issues, integrating monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, and expanding the horizon beyond. It takes true scholarship to do this. I can only concur with the author at her conclusion for the relative lack of research in this domain: “Meaningful studies of bilingual children often require intersecting skills in cognition, linguistics, sociology, and education, a combination not usually enlisted by most researchers” (p. 248). To some scholars, the book's discussions may at times appear sketchy. For example, there is no detailed description of the development of the bilingual lexicon with respect to initial semantic learning (does syntactic bootstrapping play a role? cf. Gleitman, 1990), growth profile (is there a vocabulary spurt in each language? cf. Bloom, 2000), or structural change (how does semantic organization takes place for two competing lexicons? cf. Bowerman, 1982). To others, a deeper question may be asked about why young children, but not adult learners, have the selective attention advantage (perhaps because the learning histories and contexts of usage are very different for children and adults? cf. Grosjean, 1997). To still others, mechanistic formalism of billingualism in development is lacking (e.g., how connectionist models can be implemented; cf. Li, 2002; Li & Farkas, 2002). However, none of these concerns is sufficiently great to warrant dismissal of the book's intellectual strength. I would enthusiastically recommend this book to any cognitive scientists interested in bilingualism, for its ability to identify important psycholinguistic mechanisms and its integration of issues across a wide range of cognitive domains. I would also recommend the book highly to neuroscientists interested in bilingual issues, as neuroscientists have embarked on an important enterprise of imaging bilinguals (see Grosjean, Li, Munte, & Rodriguez-Fornells, 2003; but note Bialystok's critical view on this enterprise; pp. 91-95). However, I would be rather hesitant to recommend the book to parents and teachers, as it is more of a scientific text than a practical guide, compared with other texts out there for lay readers (e.g., Cunningham-Andersson & Andersson, 1999). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)