Can bilingualism help reduce prejudice and stereotypes?

Now here is an interesting question: if babies are born to English parents but adopted by Italians, what language would they speak? And how about ducks raised by dogs – would they bark or quack? Alright, adults can easily answer these questions but try to ask the same from 5-6 year olds, and the responses will surprise you.

Psychology professor Krista Byers-Heinlein and her co-author, Concordia undergraduate student Bianca Garcia, tested 48 monolingual, simultaneous bilingual (learned two languages at once) and sequential bilingual (learned one language and then another) five- and six-year-olds, and their findings were quite different than expected.

It turns out that language learning can change children’s beliefs about a wide range of domains, reducing their biases, therefore their tendency for prejudice and stereotyping. If you are interested in how each group of children responded, read along here.

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