DOES BILINGUAL = BETTER-LINGUAL ?
In her personal narrative, Learning Sindhi...A Nuisance in my Childhood, A Connection in my Future, Shivanii narrates an incident when she forthrightly realizes the importance of learning her mother tongue and its integral role in aiding her to maintain her routes with their culture. In her text, Shivanii narrates an incident where her father, who is adamant that she speaks to him in her mothertongue, Sindhi, stops talking to her and refuses to converse with her in any language other than Sindhi. Stuck in a moment of confusion and hussle, Shivanii replies to him saying, “I tengo hambre. Mukhe comida cape.” (Manglani 2); a statement which is a mix of English, Spanish and Sindhi.
Reading this statement made by Shivanii a number of questions were raised in my mind, what caused this confusion of languages to take place? Was it because Shivanii was confused between the three languages? If so, does attempting to learn and/or converse in multiple language put an individual at a disadvantage? Would Shivanii have been less confused learning a second language, at school, which was her mother tongue and spoken by her family members at home as well, unlike Spanish? This led me to reseach the question: “To what extent does bilingualism impact cognitive skills in individuals?”, through the medium of my Project Three, Annotated Bibliography titled "Does Bilingual = Better Lingual?".
In this annotated bibliography, I have cited and analyzed three sources in order to pursue the question I have raised. The first source examines different factors impacting the cognitive skills in bilingual individuals while the second source goes on to evaluate various researches to prove an interlink between bilingualism and cognition while the third source puts forth an integral point relating to whether enough research has been done to answer the question being raised.
Reading this statement made by Shivanii a number of questions were raised in my mind, what caused this confusion of languages to take place? Was it because Shivanii was confused between the three languages? If so, does attempting to learn and/or converse in multiple language put an individual at a disadvantage? Would Shivanii have been less confused learning a second language, at school, which was her mother tongue and spoken by her family members at home as well, unlike Spanish? This led me to reseach the question: “To what extent does bilingualism impact cognitive skills in individuals?”, through the medium of my Project Three, Annotated Bibliography titled "Does Bilingual = Better Lingual?".
In this annotated bibliography, I have cited and analyzed three sources in order to pursue the question I have raised. The first source examines different factors impacting the cognitive skills in bilingual individuals while the second source goes on to evaluate various researches to prove an interlink between bilingualism and cognition while the third source puts forth an integral point relating to whether enough research has been done to answer the question being raised.
Living Multilingualism by Avantika Makar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.