Due to recent increases in globalization and population movements, cultures around the world are coming into contact with each other, resulting in an increasing number of multicultural societies. These communities lead to families and children who identify with more than one culture and potentially use different languages ​​for each parent; create new generations of bilingual children. Multilingual speakers now outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population, and as such there have been many investigations into the cognitive effects of bilingualism and any other potential effects that bilingualism may have such as effects on IQ or even attention. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayResearch into the cognitive effects of bilingualism began in the early 20th century, when researchers discovered what they believed was a "linguistic handicap" in bilingual children, and it was long believed that there was a link between bilingualism and lower intelligence. It was thought that learning two languages ​​simultaneously could lead to an intellectual and cognitive disadvantage and could also create linguistic confusion where there should be none in monolingual subjects. This "handicap" has led to bilingual children being marginalized from the social circles of both parents' cultures and suffering social isolation. This was however shown to be invalid experimentally: the results of these early tests were most likely due to the effect of immigration generally bringing lower income, less educated children and comparing them to the monolingual, highly educated children of the rich. In 1962, Pearl and Lambert published a paper emphasizing their strong systematic methodological approach. Their results showed no negative effects of bilingualism on the development of cognitive and metalinguistic systems in children. While there is evidently still controversy on the topic, there is a strongly implied positive link between bilingualism and cognitive development in most publications and experiments around the world. Since Pearl and Lambert's study, there has been much further research into the positive aspects of bilingualism. . In particular, the 1999 Bialystok experiment showed an increased ability to perform high-control tasks requiring greater cognitive flexibility in bilingual children. The Bialystok experiment consisted of 60 children, divided into two groups representing different language abilities. One group consisted of children who were bilingual in both Chinese and English, while the other group consisted of monolingual English speakers. All children came from the same socioeconomic background and all attended the same school, eliminating bias caused by the quality of teaching or geographic location. position. The children were given vocabulary tests and a visual recall task in the first session and the word moving task and the dimensional change card sorting task in the second. The results of the first session show that Bialystok's prediction is true: both groups, the bilingual and the monolingual, showed equivalent levels of receptive vocabulary and both showed a level of working memory in the visual recall test that was comparable to one another. However, the interesting result was tests that required solving tasks where the solution was complex and came with a lot of distracting information. Bilinguals showed much better results than monolinguals. This.