Watch Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism by Maria Polinsky here:
Polinsky’s talk on “Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism” aims to acknowledge bilingualism and highlight its numerous advantages. In the globalized world we live in, the norm is being bilingual and that seems to be the case for more than half of the world’s population. As Polinsky puts it in her talk about cognitive bilingualism, being monolingual is an “aberration”. Unfortunately, Polinsky does not have many good news for those who are monolingual; all the contrary, she highlights numerous advantages that bilingual brains have as opposed to monolingual ones.
The cognitive advantages of bilingualism are given great importance in her talk. She shows how research carried out in Florida proved that being bilingual can protect you against Alzheimer and other degenerative diseases. Moreover, she talks about the executive control or function, which allows bilinguals to better concentrate on a specific task and to switch their focus between one task and another more efficiently.
Polinsky also underlines the power of several educational advantages related to bilingualism. For instance, bilingualism is said to enhance creativity, it can help speakers appreciate other languages and it raises their cultural awareness as well as their cross-cultural communication skills, it allows them to “have a greater social adaptability, their thinking and reasoning skills are better, and their cognitive abilities are also greater” (Odoyo 2014).
Contrariwise, there seem to be a couple of disadvantages of bilingualism in early years of life. Polinsky explains that until the age of five, bilingual children seem to have a lack of vocabulary in both languages. In other words, a five-year-old monolingual child has a greater repertoire of vocabulary in his/her language than a bilingual child in that same language. Another disadvantage that Polinsky reveals is language interference. In some cases, one language is more dominant than the other and that can affect the less dominant language. The good news are that bilingual children eventually catch up with vocabulary after the age of five and thus the disadvantages mentioned above disappear later on in teenagerhood and adulthood.
In conclusion, we should all encourage language learning, and we should see bilingualism and multilingualism as something very beneficial for individuals and societies. We should try to increase our opportunities for language exposure and comprehensible input as much as possible, since the origin of language acquisition lies here. We should all together maintain and even expand the bilingual and multilingual world that we live in by learning languages and we should not let monolingual societies dominate the world and belittle its precious language diversity.
References
Polinsky, M. (2015). Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism. Serious Science. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ml2dD4SIk
The Acquisition of English As a Foreign Language in Bilingual and Multilingual Contexts 
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