A new study conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has revealed that bilingualism or the ability to speak more than one language acts as an advantage in multilingual and multicultural communities. This is especially unique to linguistically and culturally diverse regions such as North East India, the study reveals.
This study titled Bilingual Language Processing in Multilingual and Multicultural Communities of Northeast India, was conducted jointly by the Centre for Linguistic Science and Technology and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Guwahati.
Speaking more than one language, and regularly switching between languages have their benefits, Dr Bidisha Som, researcher and Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Guwahati tells PTI.
The study primarily focuses on different linguistic groups within the Ao Naga community that had bilinguals who had Naga languages as their first language, Dr Som explained. Eighty Ao-Sangtam and eighty Ao-English individuals participated in this study, she added.
Describing the Ao-Sangtam participants, who are originally from Nagaland, Opangienla Kechu, a member of the research team and faculty at Dimapur's Testo College says that they have been living in a diverse cultural and linguistic setting for many years.
In contrast, Kechu says that the Ao-English participants, also originally from Nagaland, are university students studying in various regions of India where English is the primary language.
"This research will pave the path to understanding bilingual/multilingual impact among indigenous languages, non-immigrant, non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) population," she added.
The research team is currently approaching this study from multiple perspectives and is involved in studying many other bilingual groups, Dr Som says.
"We would like to stress the fact that northeast India is unique in its linguistic and cultural diversity. We have made a beginning towards understanding this interaction between language use and non-linguistic cognition and this region has so much to teach us,” she said.
Through this study, it has been proven that the test packages used for lab-based studies can be updated to suit real-world situations, says Dr Som. She also pointed out that the researchers interacted with the subjects in their real-life settings, though standard protocols of research in the domain were followed
"Thus, for the most part, researchers went to the participants, rather than bringing them to the lab. As a result, this study helped in giving higher generalisability to the theories in this domain," she added.
Dr Som defines bilingual advantage as the enhanced performance of bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals when it comes to non-verbal tasks and these tasks require various cognitive control processes such as conflict resolution, attention, shifting, updating, and working memory.
The study involved translation recognition and lexical decision tasks.
