Toronto: Kids who can speak in two or more languages have a better command on routine functioning, reveals a study.

According to researchers, bilingual children are better than monolinguals at a certain type of mental control, and those children with more practice switching between languages have even greater skills.

‘This switching becomes more frequent as children grow older and as their vocabulary size increases,’ said senior author of the study Diane Poulin-Dubois from Concordia University in Montreal, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

‘Therefore, the superior performance on these conflict tasks appears to be due to bilinguals' strengthened cognitive flexibility and selective attention abilities as they have increased experience in switching across languages in expressive vocabulary,’ Dubois added.

‘For the most part, there was no difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers,’ Poulin-Dubois stated.

It was not surprising to the researchers that the bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts, the study found.