Second-Language Acquisition and Bilingualism at an Early Age

Second-Language Acquisition and Bilingualism at an Early Age and the Impact on Early Cognitive Development

This report looks at recent research on bilingual education and studies the implications of these findings to answer important questions about bilingualism and its effects on cognitive development. Three main questions addressed in this paper are: Does language acquisition proceed at the same rate for both languages? How well are bilingual children able to acquire literacy skills at school, especially if their home language is different from the school language? Are cognitive development tasks other than literacy affected when a child is bilingual, especially in the language of instruction is the child's weaker language?