双语让儿童更有创造力

Dr Lauchlan said: "Bilingualism is now largely seen as being beneficial to children but there remains a view that it can be confusing, and so potentially detrimental to them.
劳克伦博士说："现在基本上都认为双语对孩子有益，但是仍有观点认为，双语会让孩子混乱，对他们有着潜在的不利影响。"

"Our study has found that it can have demonstrable benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively. We also assessed the children's vocabulary, not so much for their knowledge of words as their understanding of them. Again, there was a marked difference in the level of detail and richness in description from the bilingual pupils.
"我们的研究发现，双语有着显而易见的好处，这不仅仅体现在语言上，它对算数、解决问题或创造性思考等方面都有益处。我们也对孩子们的词汇进行了评估，对词语理解的评估内容比对词语了解的相关内容要多一些 。双语儿童在描述的细节和丰富程度上，再一次体现出了显著的差异。

"We also found they had an aptitude for selective attention- the ability to identify and focus on information which is important, while filtering out what is not- which could come from the ‘code-switching' of thinking in two different languages."
"我们发现他们有选择性注意的倾向，他们有发现并关注重要信息而忽略不重要信息的能力，这可能来自两种语言不同思维的‘代码转换'。"

In the study, a total of 121 children in Scotland and Sardinia- 62 of them bilingual- were set tasks in which they were asked to reproduce patterns of coloured blocks, to repeat orally a series of numbers, to give clear definitions of words and to resolve mentally a set of arithmetic problems. The tasks were all set in English or Italian and the children taking part were aged around nine.
在研究中，共有121名儿童，他们分别来自苏格兰岛和撒丁岛——其中62名是双语儿童。给这些儿童布置了一些任务，要求他们重现彩色方块的图案、口头重复一串数字，对词语给出清晰的解释，并只通过思考来解决一系列算数问题。任务都是用英语或意大利语说明的，参与的儿童年龄在9岁左右。

During the research, Dr Lauchlan's post at the University of Cagliari was funded by the Sardinian Regional Government (Regione Autonoma della Sardegna). he study has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism.
在该研究中， 劳克伦博士在卡利亚里大学的职位是由撒丁岛地区政府赞助的。该研究已发表在 《国际双语研究》上。