Scientists have long assumed that the "bilingualism advantage", the enhanced ability to filter out important information among nonimportant material, stems from how bilingual people process language.

The new study confirms that assumption, and goes on to suggest that bilingual people are more efficient at higher level brain functions such as ignoring other irrelevant information.

In the study, brain scans showed that people who spoke only one language had to work harder to focus on a single word, according to the study published today in the journal Brain and Language done by the Univ. of Illionois.

People who are bilingual are constantly activating both languages in their brain, choosing which to use and which to ignore, a news report by Prensa Latina News Agency revealed.(KH)