Ágnes Melinda Kovács,1 and Jacques Mehler report that in 3 eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old infants, raised with 2 languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals.
Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to respond to a speech or visual cue to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen, only bilinguals succeeded in redirecting their anticipatory looks when the cue began signaling the reward on the opposite side.
Bilingual infants rapidly suppressed their looks to the first location and learned the new response.
These findings show that processing representations from 2 languages leads to a domain-general enhancement of the cognitive control system well before the onset of speech.
Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants
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