Researcher Reza Kormi-Nouri's study shows that bilingual children have a linguistic head start when they first go to school, but fall behind as they get older. His study, published in the 'Bilingualism: Language and Cognition' journal, runs counter to previous previous findings in the field.
"It's surprising because until now we believed it was the other way around: that bilingual children do worse in the first years of school but then catch up," said Kormi-Nouri in a release.
Kormi-Nouri carried out two types of tests in Iran on bilingual and monolingual children aged between 7 and 12-years-old. All of the children were tested in Persian, the language used in school. At home, the bilingual children spoke either Turkish or Kurdish.
The children were first given three minutes to come up with as many words as possible starting with a certain letter or relating to a particular category.
The younger bilingual children matched the single-language children in the letter test and scored higher in the category test. As they grew older, however, the bilingual children were overtaken, and Kormi-Nouri noted that the discrepancy widened with age. [...]
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