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A Study On The Mental Health Of Bilinguals

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counterparts. Each of the three papers concluded that there are cognitive advantages which are present in bilinguals. The next section of this segment focuses on the mental health of bilinguals. Research conducted on 18,716 adolescents in England, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands sought to understand whether there is a mental health advantage amongst 14-15-year-old immigrants from over 30 different countries of origin (Mood, Jonsson, and Låftman, 2016). The study administered questionnaires and tests to students from 480 schools and consisted of both immigrants and majority participants. The researchers found that immigrant youths have better mental health than the majority. This suggests that there is a correlation between policies of welfare states, the country of origin, and the mental health of the children. A longitudinal study of 21,260 children found that there is a correlation between bilingualism and the externalizing and internalizing behavior levels amongst children (Han & Huang, 2010). The study, which used both testing and event sampling, found that between kindergarten and fifth-grade non-English-dominant bilingual and fluent bilingual children reported lower levels of internalizing and externalizing compared to English-dominant bilinguals, non-English-monolinguals, and white-English monolingual children. This provides evidence of an advantage in mental health in bilinguals, particularly in non-English-dominant bilinguals and fluent

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