The immigrant-makes-good story is a staple of the American mythos, but a new European study suggests one reason foreign-born children show academic advantages in the United States: Growing up multilingual may cushion children from the cognitive stress of poverty.
As my colleague Lesli Maxwell reports over at Learning the Language, a study to be published in Psychological Science finds that immigrant students in poverty in Luxembourg had smaller vocabularies than their native-born peers, but better attention and focus during cognitive tasks.
The study has a relatively small sample size, but it adds to growing evidence that learning multiple languages enhances the brain’s flexibility and problem-solving ability.