Due to the recent increase in globalization and population movements, cultures around the world are coming into contact with each other, which which gives rise to a growing 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, much research has been conducted on 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 should not be banned"?Get the original essayResearch into the cognitive effects of bilingualism began in the early 20th century, when researchers discovered what they believed to be a “linguistic handicap” in bilingual languages. 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 cause an intellectual and cognitive disadvantage, and could also create linguistic confusion where there should not be any in monolingual subjects. This “handicap” has led bilingual children to be excluded from the social circles of their parents’ culture and to suffer from social isolation. This, however, was found to be experimentally invalid - the results of these early tests were most likely due to the effect of immigration typically bringing in low-income, less-educated children and comparing them to the highly-educated, monolingual children of the rich. In 1962, Pearl and Lambert published a publication emphasizing their strong systematic methodological approach. Their results showed no negative effects of bilingualism on the development of cognitive and metalinguistic systems in children. Although there is obviously still controversy surrounding the topic, there is a strongly implied positive link between bilingualism and cognitive development in the majority of publications and experiments around the world. After Pearl and Lambert's study, much additional research was conducted on the positive aspects of bilingualism. . In particular, the Bialystok experiment in 1999 showed an increased ability to perform high control tasks requiring increased cognitive flexibility in bilingual children. The Bialystok experiment included 60 children, divided into two groups representing different language abilities. One group consisted of children who were bilingual in Chinese and English, while the other group consisted of monolingual English speakers. All children came from the same socio-economic background and all attended the same school, eliminating bias caused by quality of education or geographic location. location. Children underwent vocabulary tests and a visual recall task in the first session, as well as the moving words 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 they both showed a level of working memory in the recall test visual comparable to that of another. However, the interesting result was tests that required solving tasks in which the solution was 20.