Raymond M. Klein
Scholars and educators were once concerned that encouraging children to learn more than one language might have adverse cognitive consequences (Darcy, 1953). And for some linguistic capacities (e.g., fluency, vocabulary) this is often true (Bialystok, Craik & Luk, 2012). Unfortunately, such individual costs might discourage governmental policies that are aimed at fostering multi-lingualism, despite its widely acknowledged societal benefits. Peal & Lambert (1962) helped overcome this concern and through her "myth-dispelling" efforts and prodigious empirical output, Bialystok has pushed the pendulum of opinion in the opposite direction.