Childish bilingualism is not the addition of the two languages in the child's brain. Rather, it is about building a two-pronged linguistic capacity. Indeed, the structures of the brain of the young child are so flexible that they can learn two or three languages as easily as only one, and this until the age of 7 years.

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On condition that languages are learned at the "language age", that is to say  At a time when brain plasticity is on the rise, it is just as natural to learn one or two languages.

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After the critical age of seven, the acquisition of a new language is another process and must make the detour through the mother tongue. You could say that after seven years, you no longer learn language but languages.

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Short,  if we are lucky enough to fall like Obelix, as a baby, into a magic potion made up of two or more languages, that is to say to be immersed in bilingualism from the very beginning, we become bilingual.

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It is the presence or absence of a language in the environment that stimulates the acquisition or on the contrary causes the loss of a language. From a neurological point of view, certain connections between neurons  are requested when "flexibility" (in scientific language,  cortical malleability) of the brain in full swing, connections which, in monolingual children, have been sclerotic at the language age with the result, the final closure of this  cognitive window.

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These "cabling", installed during the construction of the  language, have repercussions on the child's entire future in several respects, particularly with regard to his schooling.

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The most exhaustive research in this area comes from immersion programs in Canada, carried out for twenty years between the sixties and the eighties, with the aim of making language teaching truly effective in an officially bilingual country.

During this period, French in Canada was threatened by English-speaking Canada. This is why attempts have been made to offer a school curriculum in French for English-speaking children, and, conversely, a curriculum in English for French-speaking children.  Thus, comparisons could be made on samples of monolingual children from the same establishments by  tests  verbal and non-verbal.  

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It should be noted that these programs concerned children who did not use the second language (English or French) outside of the school context.  

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The results are surprisingly unanimous. There are excellent results in terms of second language learning abilities in children exposed to these tests.

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Even more surprisingly, there was also greater mental flexibility, conceptual mobility and problem-solving ability than in monolingual children . The consequences  Particularly impressive were shown in the field of mathematics, where children from bilingual education systematically scored higher than their monolingual peers.

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According to the researchers, this phenomenon is explained by the intellectual stimulation provided by bilingualism . More precisely, the phonological and grammatical capacities and the calculation capacity are governed by the same frontal brain area (which is called  Broca's area). Thus, the stimulation of this area by early bilingualism leads to the creation of numerous neuronal connections, which would have direct repercussions on the potentialities in mathematics.