New bilingualism research 2. Bilinguals and social skills

According to this research, bilinguals develop certain social skills earlier than their monolingual peers. The experiments described here are pretty cool.

Of course, I have no way of knowing how this aspect of my son's personality would have developed had he remained monolingual, but ever since he has been bilingual, he has been highly praised by his teachers for his social skills. 

New bilingualism research 1

Anna Christiansen, "Speaking two languages is better for your brain than Sudoku." The study referred to, by Viorica Marian et al., is here. 

I'll be trying to keep abreast of new developments in bilingualism research on this site. 

One comment on the Christiansen article. At the end the author writes: "It appears that bilingual speakers have a competitive advantage." This kind of thing is almost always the "takeaway" in popular reportage on bilingualism. Now, I'm very happy that recent research has put the old fear to rest that bilingualism negatively affects a wide range of cognitive abilities.* But personally, I like to think of the advantages in terms of expanding the possibilities of communication with other people, not increasing competitive edge over them. For me, teaching my son a second language is about raising a better global citizen, not about tooling up a little capitalist.

*See the literature cited at Wikipedia, "Cognitive advantages of bilingualism" (History), notes 2-5.