Can learning a new language make children more creative?

When people ask me why I’m so passionate about foreign language teaching in the early years, creativity isn’t usually the first thing they expect me to mention. Pronunciation, memory, confidence — sure. But creativity?

It turns out the link is real, and in my latest study with colleagues Ian Apperly and Andrea Krott at the University of Birmingham, we found some clear evidence.

What we did

We followed 99 monolingual English-speaking children, all around four to five years old, over their first six months of primary school. None of them had any prior exposure to another language. They fell into three groups, depending on what their school offered:

• Bilingual school — children were taught through a second language for half the school time.
• Weekly language lessons — children had a foreign language class once a week
• No foreign language provision at all (our comparison group)

At the start of the school year, and again 24 weeks later, we measured their divergent thinking — their ability to come up with lots of different, original ideas. In this case, children were shown a simple shape, like a square, and asked to turn it into as many different pictures as they could imagine — a house, a robot, a window, anything they could dream up. We also measured their attention and cognitive flexibility, to check whether any creativity boost was simply down to sharper focus rather than something language-specific

What we found

At the start, all three groups performed similarly — no surprises there, since none of them had any language exposure yet. But six months on, a clear pattern emerged:

• Children in bilingual schools showed a significant jump in creative fluency (generating more ideas) and flexibility (generating more different kinds of ideas), clearly outperforming the no-language group.
• Children with weekly lessons also improved, but more modestly — not quite enough to stand out statistically from the no-language group, though their scores sat right in between.
• Crucially, this creativity boost wasn’t explained by improvements in attention or cognitive flexibility skills. So this isn’t just “language learning makes children generally sharper” — something more specific to language exposure itself seems to be at play.

Why this matters for the classroom and home

A few honest takeaways, without overstating the findings:

1. The “dose” of language exposure seems to matter. A once-a-week lesson is valuable, but more sustained, immersive exposure showed the strongest effect here. If you’re a teacher advocating for more curriculum time for languages, this is solid evidence to bring to that conversation.

2. You don’t need years for benefits to show. These effects appeared after just six months — at the very start of formal schooling. This is encouraging for any teacher or parent wondering whether early efforts are “too soon” to matter.

3. It’s likely not just about focus or self-control. We often assume bilingual advantages come down to children getting better at filtering out distractions. This study suggests something else is going on too — possibly richer, more interconnected webs of vocabulary and concepts that simply give children more raw material to draw on when thinking up new ideas.

4. Cultural exposure may be part of the story too. Many of the bilingual school children in our study had their first real encounter with another culture through teachers and staff who were native speakers of a different language. There’s separate evidence that experiencing cultural diversity — not just a new language in isolation — is itself linked to boosts in creative and flexible thinking. So it may not just be the words children pick up, but the wider exposure to different ways of seeing and doing things that comes bundled with it.

Try this

If you’re a parent, you don’t need a bilingual school to plant the seed — songs, picture books, or even casual exposure to a second language and culture at home all add to a child’s richness of experience over time. For teachers, this is a nice piece of evidence to share with leadership teams who are weighing up timetable priorities for languages.

A note for multilingual families

If you’re already raising your children with more than one language at home, this research is one more reason to keep going, even when it feels like hard work some days. Speaking your home language with your child, sharing its stories and traditions, isn’t just about preserving culture and connection — it appears to feed directly into their creative thinking too. Don’t let anyone make you feel you need to choose just one language for your child’s sake; the evidence keeps pointing the other way.

This post is based on our peer-reviewed study published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. You can read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728924000579