When I think back to my childhood, I can still hear the singsong rhythm of French music echoing in the kitchen. I was eight then, tracing unfamiliar words across the pages of my textbook, the smell of my dad’s crêpes sweetening the air. My little brother, still in diapers, tried to babble along, too young to quite catch anything around him. Between my full immersion in a French elementary school west of Paris and my family’s knack for languages, I became entirely bilingual within a year. My four-year-old brother wasn’t as lucky, gaining little more than fuzzy recollections of the City of Light and a few French phrases now etched in the family vocabulary. As the years passed and we moved back to the United States, our paths began to diverge in ways that puzzled me. I adored everything about school: the crisp scratch of pencil on paper, the thrill of understanding something new, the quiet satisfaction of perfect test scores neatly circled in red. My brother, on the other hand, lived only for the roar of the crowd on the soccer field, for grass-stained knees and the rhythm of running. He dreaded classrooms and their required focus the way I dreaded sprint drills and their horrible way of leaving me out of breath.
Somewhere in those differences, a question began to form. Could language, specifically bilingualism, shape how we think, learn, and grow? Could the simple act of juggling two tongues have stretched and transformed my mind in ways his never needed to? These observations made me wonder if our differences aren’t just about preference: could they reveal something deeper about how language alters cognitive development in childhood? My findings suggest that bilingualism may have considerable effects on the physical development, memory, and attention of children.
I began my research and promptly noticed the prevalence of studies discussing the physical changes that learning another language in childhood causes in the brain. One in particular stood out during my research: a study (2021) co-authored by Juliana Ronderos, a professor at Teachers College, a graduate research affiliate school of Columbia University. Her team used fMRI imaging, technology that measures the amount of fractional anisotropy (FA), healthy and mature brain matter, to evaluate the differences between the brains of more than 400 bilingual children and 420 monolingual children. Their observations indicated that bilinguals undergo significant changes in brain structure, particularly in gray matter regions, and that these changes occur in stages. And not only does the act of being fluent in another language impact children’s brain structure during the critical period of early childhood development, but its effects continue into adolescence and even adulthood. In Stage 1 (under sixteen years old), bilingual children have less gray matter than monolinguals because they are adapting to the interference of two languages. In Stage 2 (over sixteen years old) however, bilingual children developed increased gray matter as well as subcortical matter because their brains have become accustomed and grown stronger in dealing with the language interference that occurs constantly in their minds (Ronderos et al., 2021). Subcortical and cerebellar gray matter is responsible for motor skills, emotions, and sensory processing, meaning that bilingual children are first limited and then bolstered in their ability to control their movement and emotions. This could give them advantages in social settings as they interact with peers. They may have a more adequate understanding of facial and body cues or succeed in important physical tasks such as writing with a pencil and sitting still during reading time. In my experience, I am better able to pick up on the emotions of others than my brother, which I learned from these findings may be because of increased gray matter that comes from bilingualism.
Based on the finding that bilingualism has a substantial impact on the structural development of children’s brains, I was able to recognize that these structural differences may also shed light on further effects of bilingualism, especially in cognitive functionality. To explore this idea further, I found an article (2004) written by acclaimed psycholinguist, cognition scientist, and Northwestern University professor Viorica Marian, well-known in the psychology community for her research on multilingualism and the brain. Marian and her co-author, psychologist Anthony Shook, analyzed data they collected from a variety of published scientific experiments and identified trends within the studies’ reported effects of bilingualism, claiming that higher gray matter in the left inferior parietal cortex is directly tied to mastery of multiple languages, and especially its learning when early in life (Marian & Shook, 2004). The left parietal cortex coordinates memory and language function in the brain, so an increase in brain matter in that region makes children more likely to be more successful in academic settings that require a strong working memory or high lexile level.
This idea that bilingual children have a better memory immediately caught my attention, especially since that is one of the core differences I feel that me and my brother have in regards to our academic motivation and performance. As I progressed in my schooling, I found myself with a strong recollection of topics and principles learned in years prior, forming a solid foundation to build upon as I continued with my education. On the other hand, my brother experienced difficulty remembering concepts from before, leaving him prone to surface-level understanding likely to leave him even farther behind. In order to find a credible explanation for this fascinating idea, I found research on bilingualism and memory in a study (2016) published by two highly-regarded research fellows at the JSS psychology institute in Mysuru, India. Authors Suma Raju and Nuggehalli Puttaveeraiah Nataraja evaluated the impact of bilingualism on the executive working memory of 250 Kannada and English-Kannada speaking children. In recording the scores of the bilingual experimental group, researchers found that they scored higher than the monolingual group on both working memory tests: verbal recall and visiual-spatial (Raju & Nataraja, 2016). Based on these results, children who are fluent in more than one language have an edge in the memory category, boasting higher working memory capabilities that can translate into higher intelligence and faster and more accurate recall for school tests. Marian’s article “The Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism” (2004) mentioned previously also denotes the predominance of data that supports this theory, citing several other studies in its conclusion that being bilingual leads directly to “better memory, visual-spatial skills, and even creativity” (Marian & Shook, 2004). Because fluency in multiple languages demands flexible thinking, strong vocabulary recall, and constant attention to cultural and linguistic context, bilingual children have a very strong memory. The specific skills they have as multilingual individuals make them likely to learn another language with ease, solve mental math problems very quickly, and remember important details related to their relationships and environment. In my experience, these are the exact skills I have seen growth in, while my brother has found more success in less academic pursuits.
One of bilingualism’s most studied effects is its increased executive function and attention control. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, a prominent journalist for The New York Times and a bilingual himself, summarizes the existing scientific evidence surrounding the link between being bilingual and being able to focus. He claims that executive function—the brain’s ability to plan ahead, problem solve, and complete challenging tasks—is bolstered by bilingualism. (Bhattacharjee, 2012). Being bilingual provides a significant advantage in both high-pressure situations and regular life processes because of its boost to the brain’s attention center. While I was able to focus easily in social conversations, my brother often experienced difficulty forming meaningful relationships because he could not stay engaged with the topic at hand for more than a few minutes. Furthermore, I found a related study evaluating the impacts of bilingualism on attention control in a 2017 edition of the psychology journal Developmental Science. Co-written by professors from the human development, linguistics, and psychology departments at the University of Michigan, this study intended to identify cognitive differences in bilingual attention via data collected from fNRIS imaging. Their findings were very significant, the most noteworthy discovery being support for the idea that being bilingual in childhood, the brain’s crucial growth period, may result in changes to attention control in the long and short term (Arrendondo et al., 2017). Not only does being bilingual make your brain stronger, but it also continues to have important consequences for attention control later in life.
Although many studies support the idea that bilingualism has demonstrated truly significant effects on the brain’s physical structure, working memory, and executive attention functions, scientists are still trying to assess the validity of this new data to ensure that the results observed are not due to other outside factors. At the University of Western Ontario, psychology department chairs Bruce Morton and Sarah Harper presented an alternate explanation for the plethora of support for bilingualism’s many positive effects. Their study (2007) assessed bilingual French-English and monolingual English children’s scores from the Simon test, a measure of cognitive control, by comparing results only among groups with identical socioeconomic status (SES). This important step in their experiment yielded interesting results: bilinguals and monolinguals of the same SES scored almost identically, while all individuals with high SES scored higher, regardless of language proficiency. These results suggest that the cognitive benefits commonly attributed to bilingualism are actually due to differences in the environment the child is raised in, not how many languages they know, and that “controlling for differences in ethnicity and SES can attenuate the bilingual advantage” (Morton & Harper, 2007). So, if it is just a child’s socioeconomic environment that impacts executive control and development, bilingualism may soon lose its value in and cognitive success and may not be pushed so much in schools. In my experience, I cannot confirm or deny this claim, since my brother and I lived in an identical socio-economic situation, giving no scientific way to compare our development due to SES.
Overall, the research I found suggests a very fascinating link between bilingualism and the cognitive development of children, altering their brain structure by increasing brain matter, strengthening working memory, and increasing executive function and attentional control. Its real-world impacts stretch all the way from academic success and intelligence to improved social interactions and relationships, to improved quality of life, indicating that bilinguals are more likely to enjoy many benefits solely because of exposure to a different linguistic environment. Outside of pure academic personal benefit, the findings of these researchers could be used to benefit the lives of all students. Implementing more immersive language programs, international experiences, and other linguistic and multicultural opportunities could provide more students with the chance to develop these meaningful skills that accompany a bilingual brain. If an effort was made to make language a bigger priority in the American educational system and beyond, the data suggests that society as a whole will see demonstrable benefits in academic settings. However, it’s clear there is still much to learn. Further studies need to be done to ensure that this conclusion is valid; at least one found more correlation between socioeconomic status and cognitive success than bilingualism did. The evidence from most studies on multilingualism truly demonstrates the stark differences I observed between me, as a bilingual, and my brother, as a monolingual, in our focus, academic success, and social-emotional intelligence. I have found the anecdotal changes in my own family are actually supported by a significant body of scientific literature, and it is a worthwhile question to continue to explore in a scholarly setting. Understanding how bilingualism and cognitive development interact may be the next step in uncovering how language truly shapes the mind.
Works Cited
Arredondo, M., Hu, X., Satterfield, T., & Kovelman, I. (2017). Bilingualism alters children’s frontal lobe functioning for attentional control. Developmental Science, 20. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12377
Bhattacharjee, Y. (2012, March 17). Why Bilinguals Are Smarter. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
Marian, V., Shook, A. (2012). The cognitive benefits of being bilingual. Cerebrum, 13. Accessed October 20, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3583091/pdf/cer-12-13.pdf
Morton, J., Harper, S. (2007). What did Simon say? Revisiting the bilingual advantage. Developmental Science, 10(6), 719-726. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00623
Raju, S., Nataraja, N. (2016). Assessment of working memory in bilingual children. Indian Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(2), 159-165. Accessed October 15, 2025. http://www.iahrw.com/index.php/home/journal_detail/19#list
Ronderos, J., Zuk, J., Hernandez, A., & Vaughn, K. (2024). Large-scale investigation of white matter structural differences in bilingual and monolingual children: An adolescent brain cognitive development data study. Wiley Journal of Neurochemistry, 45(2), https://doi-org.byu.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/hbm.26608
