If you raise your child with Dutch, as well as NGT you can say you're raising your child bilingually. In the past few years, a number of important advantages of bilingualism have been brought to light. Using multiple languages appears to work like gymnastics for the brain, something the brain really has to work hard for and for which it gains certain advantages. Bilingualism seems to have a number of important cognitive advantages, advantages in the development of the thinking process. Having to constantly switch between language 1 and language 2 and back again, and having parents do this as well, teaches the child what is necessary exactly and when, for example. Researchers have shown that multilingual children are particularly good at focussing and not getting distracted by irrelevant information. These children also often thrive at abstract thinking and technical reading. An added advantage is that they don't just learn their first languages, but they pick up other languages more easily than children who grew up monolingually.

Research is now being done into multilingualism of a sign language and a spoken language, in Nijmegen and a few other places in the world. We recently discovered children who learn these languages also seem to have some extraordinary advantages over children who only learn one language. This also seems to be related to the way the deaf children, as well as hearing children (so-called bimodal bilingualism) handle the two languages on a daily basis.

Besides these cognitive advantages, bilingualism of a spoken and a sign language also has important social and social-emotional advantages for deaf children. It enables a child to come into contact with not only hearing people, but also with deaf children and adults who have mastered sign language. Deaf children often find this very pleasant because they don't have to try quite as hard to communicate for a while. In addition, there are plenty of studies suggesting deaf children who feel isolated by obstacles in their communication can end up experiencing social-emotional issues in the long run. If a child feels like a part of an environment where he/she isn't any different from everyone else, there's a lower chance of those types of issues surfacing.

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