Jul 20, 2015 08:52 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research suggests that people who speak two languages have more brain power.

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center found that bilingual people have more gray matter in the executive control region of their brain, latina.com reported..

Early on, it was thought that people who spoke two languages would be at a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, studies have shown that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."

This advantage is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.

"Inconsistencies in the reports about the bilingual advantage stem primarily from the variety of tasks that are used in attempts to elicit the advantage," Guinevere Eden, senior author of the study, said in a statement. "Given this concern, we took a different approach and instead compared gray matter volume between adult bilinguals and monolinguals. We reasoned that the experience with two languages and the increased need for cognitive control to use them appropriately would result in brain changes in Spanish-English bilinguals when compared with English-speaking monolinguals. And in fact greater gray matter for bilinguals was observed in frontal and parietal brain regions that are involved in executive control."

For the recent study, researchers compared gray matter in bilinguals of American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English with monolingual users of English.

"Our aim was to address whether the constant management of two spoken languages leads to cognitive advantages and the larger gray matter we observed in Spanish-English bilinguals, or whether other aspects of being bilingual, such as the large vocabulary associated with having two languages, could account for this," Olumide Olulade, lead author of the study said in a statement.

Both ASL-English and Spanish-English bilinguals share qualities associated with bilingualism, such as vocabulary size. But unlike bilinguals of two spoken languages, ASL-English bilinguals can sign and speak simultaneously, allowing the researchers to test whether the need to inhibit the other language might explain the bilingual advantage.

"Unlike the findings for the Spanish-English bilinguals, we found no evidence for greater gray matter in the ASL-English bilinguals," Olulade said. "Thus we conclude that the management of two spoken languages in the same modality, rather than simply a larger vocabulary, leads to the differences we observed in the Spanish-English bilinguals."

The findings, which are detailed in the journal Cerebral Cortex, add to the growing understanding of how long-term experience with a particular skill -- in this case management of two languages -- changes the brain.

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit