A study undertaken by Dr Napoleon Katsos and Dr Kyriakos Antoniou, along with researchers at the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology, has found that speaking dialects confers the same cognitive advantages as speaking different languages.

The ability of children to speak any two dialects (two varieties of the same language) may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for children who speak two or more substantially different languages.

The new findings on bi-dialectalism have been published in the journal Cognition. 

Their research has also been published in the national press and in the Medical Xpress.