CLASS CODE:

NAME:

READING

SCORE:

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

The Benefits of Being Bilingual

According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual
or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such
children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual
peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed
researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the
cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being
bilingual.

Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at
the same time. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the
sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s
language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear ‘can’, you will
likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier
stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a
single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the
language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this
phenomenon, called ‘language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. A
Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would
look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian
word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. In
cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could
map onto words in either language.

Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties,
however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name
pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can
almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two
languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any
given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require
conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to
name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match (i.e., the
word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when
the colour and the word don’t match (i.e., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). This occurs
because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people
often excel at tasks such as this, which top into the ability to ignore competing
perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are
also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to
switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by
shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting
better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.

It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain
areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and
bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening
background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers
play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the
bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of
the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch
perception.

Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person
to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults
acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language.
This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focusing on information about the new
language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.

Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive
mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that
become damaged during aging. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to
monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over
200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients
reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than
monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of
bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms.
Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their
monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behaviour and abilities were the
same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same
amount of fuel.

Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very
early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in
monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet
appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began
appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had
to adjust the rule they’d learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully
learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older
people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far
beyond language.

Questions 27-31

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

Test Findings

Bilingual people engage

Observing the 27…………………. of Russian-
English bilingual people when asked to select certain both languages simultaneously: a
objects
mechanism known as 28…………………

Bilingual people are more able to

A test called the 29…………………, focusing on
handle tasks involving
naming colours
called 30…………………

When changing strategies,

A test involving switching between tasks
bilingual people have superior 31…………

  

Questions 32-36

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet, write

YES                  if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO                   if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN    if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32   Attitudes towards bilingualism have changed in recent years.

33   Bilingual people are better than monolingual people at guessing correctly what
words are before they are finished.

34   Bilingual people consistently name images faster than monolingual people.

35   Bilingual people’s brains process single sounds more efficiently than monolingual

People in all situations.

36   Fewer bilingual people than monolingual people suffer from brain disease in old
age.

 Questions 37-40

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37   an example of how bilingual and monolingual people’s brains respond differently
to a certain type of non-verbal auditory input

38   a demonstration of how a bilingual upbringing has benefits even before we learn
to speak

39   a description of the process by which people identify words that they hear

40   reference to some negative consequences of being bilingual