Melissa Baralt, Florida International University – Bilingualism Benefits Premature Children

The Academic Minute

On Florida International University Week: Learning a second language can be important, especially for premature babies.

Melissa Baralt, Associate Professor in Modern Languages at Florida International University, explains why.

Melissa Baralt’s funded studies explore how bilingualism moderates executive function in children born prematurely. She and her team are working with FIU’s biomedical engineering faculty to use Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the neural recruitment of executive functioning in preterm-born children with different language environments. Dr. Baralt’s research also focuses on language-development interventions for young children, with a focus on bilingual language development.

Bilingualism Benefits Premature Children

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Speaking more than one language can be beneficial for children born prematurely. Children born prematurely are often at increased risk for poor executive functioning — cognitive processes that include paying attention, planning, memory, decision-making, carrying out a task, among others.

The conventional advice given by healthcare professionals is to not expose these children to more than one language, fearing it might hinder their language acquisition or cause delays.

However, our study tells a different story. Our research found that bilingualism could be an early intervention strategy to help strengthen preterm-born children’s executive functioning. These skills are crucial for academic success.

We compared two groups of children between the ages of 6 and 7, born before 35 weeks with low birth weight and long hospital stays in the neonatal intensive care unit.We tested their executive functioning skills and found that the bilingual children performed significantly better than the monolingual children on the cognitive tests.

We hope our research can serve as a call-to-action for parents and healthcare professionals to embrace the advantages of bilingualism in nurturing the developmental skills of preterm-born children.

Read More:
[FIU] – Bilingualism benefits premature children, study finds

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