image credit: at speed, via flickr

Most of our readers are aware of the many cultural, cognitive and social benefits of raising bilingual children, which is why so many of you dedicate so much time and effort to making sure your children receive maximum exposure to two or several languages from a very young age. But what you may not know is that all that bilingual language input may also help improve your children’s reading speed and comprehension.

So how exactly does this dual language thinking help our budding bilingual readers to excel in reading skills? According to a fascinating study which was recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Associaciation for Psychological Science, bilingual individuals are unable to “switch off” a language completely, meaning that a second language is always present in the thought processes of bilingual individuals. Researchers studied this phenomenon in 45 university students whose native language was Dutch and secondary language was English. The subjects were asked to read several sentences containing both cognates (words that have a similar meaning and form across several languages, such as “leopard” and “leopardo” in English and Spanish) and control words. The study clearly revealed that readers spent less time processing the cognates than the control words as they read, suggesting that the knowledge of words with similar meanings in both languages actually reinforces reading skills and comprehension in the native language.

Of course the implications of this particular study vary according to the language combinations spoken in each bilingual family (there are obviously more English/Spanish or Spanish/French cognates than Japanese/Swedish ones), but this is very encouraging news, as it highlights just one more reason why giving your child the gift of bilingualism is so important. It also reinforces the need for a family reading routine in both languages, to make sure children are reading and being read to in both their languages on a daily basis (click here for an article on a few of the many benefits of reading aloud to children).