The cognitive consequences of bilingual education in northern Belize

Abstract

Interest in the consequences of bilingualism has been long standing in anthropology and psychology. Recent work has emphasized the value of bilingualism and reported that the experience yields highly differentiated, stable cognitive structures. This paper argues that the effects of the bilingual experience are in large measure situation specific. Using data from Belize, Central America, it shows that bilingualism acquired in a stressful environment results in predictable decrements in the patterning of semantic knowledge.