Bilingual Australians are better spellers than monolinguals but they struggle to understand some spoken English, according to the first language study of its kind conducted at the School of Psychology by Professor Marcus Taft and doctoral candidate Minh Nguyen-Hoan.

A mischievous professor occasionally wrote correspondence seeking independent separate accommodation to be made available immediately for his paraphernalia.

If you're an English-speaking Aussie, you've only got half a chance of spelling that sentence correctly because it contains so many hard-to-spell words. But if you're also fluent in another language - such as Vietnamese or Mandarin - you're much more likely to get it right, according to an unusual new study.

UNSW researchers have found that while bilingual Australians may struggle to understand some spoken English, they tend to be better spellers than monolinguals. The finding has implications for the training, education and workforce development sectors, given that one in five Australians are bilingual.

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