I've read that in bilinguals, task-switching is common and in fact bilinguals are good at. The famous Stroop test demonstrates that when monolinguals are presented with for example the color red, but the ink is in a different color, that they take longer to respond when compared to their bilingual counterpart.
As a bilingual myself, speaking English and Spanish, I have always wondered about how my brain functions and how sometimes I can switch languages, or even translate phrases into Spanish as I am reading something in English. People always ask me if I dream in English or in Spanish. My response is that usually I do dream in Spanish. I don't know if that is typical of bilinguals to dream in their native or dominant language. But I do. I also feel that I behave differently depending on whether I speak English or Spanish. I think in both languages. I express my thoughts differently in each language depending on who I am communicating with. Regardless, I feel that switching thoughts and expressions and languages can sometimes be complicated. Sometimes I cannot think of a word in English, but I know it in Spanish and vice versa. Usually, that's when I get nervous in the middle of a conversation and want to be swallowed by the earth.
I learned that not every study out there finds benefits to bilingualism. A study previously conducted recently by psychologists at Concordia University in Montreal studied 168 children ages 1 and 2 years old being raised by bilingual parents. They basically found that children in the younger half of that cohort had smaller comprehension vocabularies than monolingual children. The older half of the sample group had smaller vocabularies or could pronounce less words. They found that the result of this came from parents mixing their languages when speaking to their children, choosing the words they feel the children will have a less difficult time understanding. As we know, code switching or Spanglish inhibits language development to a certain extent. Although, bilinguals are at a disadvantage when affected by the language confusion, children do eventually catch up.
Either way, I am convinced that being bilingual has its advantages. Early on the brain begins to prune unused circuits and myelination occurs to make the brain more efficient and stronger. Meanwhile, the brain exercises instantaneous processing, deliberate focus of attention, and pattern recognition to decode language. The bilingual brain is incredibly amazing! Growing up bilingual is brainpower.
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