Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a discussion about and between ‘bilingual’ speakers on the topic of being bilangual (Earlier here). Now via EurekaNews, researchers conclude that the our cognitive control system that takes care of ‘code switching’ is basically doing a superior job.
Working together with Dutch researchers, American psychologists and linguists fired a couple of tests to bilingual speakers, ranging from showing objects that needed to be identified in either language to firing tones to force them to speak in one language.
“A bilingual learns to attend to a set of cues that allows them to suppress the stream of language, to modulate processing so that the second language is what is spoken, but the first language is still there and active.”
Initially it was thought that an ‘environment of total immersion in a language’ would provide exposure to the second language and supression of the native tongue.
Which reminds me that I find it startling that I (for example) still count in Dutch. It’s apparantly something that will never go away. I can have normal conversations in English (accented though, but not as bad as the newly elected governer of Kah-lig-forgnia) but when someone on the spot asks me to count the number of whatever comes to mind, I would still do it in Dutch.