MONTREAL - A new study has found that bilingual toddlers have a cognitive edge over their unilingual peers.

Researchers from Concordia and York universities co-authored the study, which tested 63 bilingual and unilingual toddlers.

Concordia's Diane Poulin-Dubois says that toddlers exposed to two languages from infancy outperformed unilingual kids on attention-related tasks.

"Exposing toddlers to a second language early in their development provides a bilingual advantage that enhances attention control,'' Poulin-Dubois said in a release.

"The small bilingual advantage that we observed in our 24-month-old bilinguals is probably due to a combination of infants' experience listening to and using their two languages.''

Poulin-Dubois also says that by the age of two years old, the bilingual kids had already learned vocabulary in each of their two languages. Researchers found that the children had some experience switching between the languages.

The study also shows that the cognitive advantages of bilingualism come earlier than what had been shown in previous studies, she added.

The research, also co-authored by the Universite de Provence in France, was published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Thirty of the study's 63 participants were deemed unilingual because at least 80 per cent of their overall language exposure was to their dominant tongue. The rest of the kids were categorized as bilingual for the study.

The dominant language for each of the children studied was either French or English.

This research was funded by the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.