Early bilingualism and cognitive abilities of the child (review of scientific sources)

Introduction. A modern child often finds himself in a multilinguistic environment, and even within the family, parents can speak different languages, and therefore it is necessary to understand the consequences for the child’s cognitive development of early learning of two languages. At the moment, there is no common view on the problem and there is significant inconsistency in published scientific works. The purpose of this review is to analyze studies that aimed to compare the cognitive development of children acquiring one or two languages in early childhood. Materials and methods. The research methodology was based on general scientific methods and methods of special sciences: psychology and pedagogy. To search for articles, the databases “PubMed”, “Google Scholar”, “ResearchGate” and Russian libraries “Elibrary.ru”, “CyberLeninka” were used. The materials for the analysis were articles from the listed databases, describing the most significant results in the study of bilingualism Research results. The acquisition of any language has the same biological foundation, which is the basis for the interaction of languages. With the sequential acquisition of different languages, the mother language becomes a matrix that facilitates the acquisition of other languages, especially the most complex grammatical forms. In this case, some slowdown in the development of complex grammatical forms at the first stages of language acquisition will later be replaced by a significant advantage of bilinguals over monolinguals in cognitive development. KEYWORDS Conclusion. An analysis of the literature led to the conclusion that bilinguals have an advantage in analyzing complex speech streams, although the processing of this information is somewhat slower. In children learning one language at 10-12 months, a perceptual reorganization occurs, according to which a decrease in the ability to perceive elements of a non-native language is detected. In bilinguals, this process does not occur at an early age, which allows them to distinguish the subtle features of unfamiliar languages. In general, in the early stages of exposure to two languages, bilinguals are slower to master many aspects of the two languages, but in later life, bilinguals are found to have an advantage in terms of level of psychological development.