Science & Technology - Posted by Karene Booker-Cornell on
Monday, July 18, 2011 14:41 - 0 Comments Bilingual kids tune
into right stuff CORNELL (US) — Young children who learn a
second language have a heightened ability to pay attention to
what’s important and to ignore what’s not. “Our study showed
that bilingualism in young children strengthens what is known as
executive attention, which helps orient individuals in the sea
of information coming in,” says Sujin Yang, formerly a
postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University and
currently professor at Tyndale University College in Canada. “It
helps them know what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and
what action to take.” The study is published in the July issue
of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Straight from the
Source “We were able to begin to separate out the effects of
bilingualism from the effects of culture, which other studies
had not done,” notes co-author Barbara Lust, professor of human
development at Cornell University. “Culture st