Advantages of Bilingual Children

This independence of thought, therefore allows a free flow of creative ideas and allows for the code switching ability to aid in solving the problems presented. Myers-Scotton believes that code switching is an abstract function of cognition (Myers-Scotton and Jake 84)
Code switching does have its drawbacks. There are times when interference occurs. Interference is the process of substituting a word in one language into a sentence that is intended to be in the other language. This occurs most often in younger children who are still learning new vocabulary and developing executive functioning. In Spanish/English bilinguals this is referred to as "Spanglish" within the culture. It is a common occurrence in some cases when the "other" does not readily come to mind. This happens occasionally within groups of same language bilinguals and is a cultural identifier (Bourne 108).
Another form of mental flexibility that manifests itself in the thinking language of multilingual people, is the commonality of thought processes also being flexible in language. This means the ability to think in the language that is being spoken rather than translating from one language to another. The ability to reason in both languages is a basic definition of bilingualism (Rosenberg 1). …