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The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism
- anu7df 11y agoOK. So there is no executive function advantage. But so far no one has seen a disadvantage either. Right? Since no one would argue that knowing an extra language is not useful, I wonder why this "bitterness" matters.
- bsbechtel 11y agoHmmm, I wasn't aware of any bitterness or fight over this either, just a recent increase in articles touting the benefits of it. Seems to me this is one of those "media manufactures fake outrage" articles.
- RickHull 11y agoThe bitterness seems real: > The debate has clearly become acrimonious. Paap says that he has been ignored; Bialystok feels she is being personally attacked. Perhaps, wrote Eric-Jan Wagenmakers from the University of Amsterdam, the two sides could form an “adversarial collaboration.” That is, they would work together to test the bilingual advantage once and for all, through a large study, perhaps involving many labs. The teams would pre-register all their experimental plans and agree to publish the results no matter what, so there could be no accusation of questionable research practices or publication bias. Then let the chips fall where they may. This approach has already been used to some success in other areas of psychology. > Paap is up for it; Bialystok is not. “That’s not how science works: You don’t sign a contract to not change anything in your protocol as the research evolves,” she says. “And they’ve set up so many toxins in this area that no good collaboration can result.” Bak feels similarly. “How much would I win by working with someone who doesn’t understand the area and is already biased?”
- geomark 11y agoA lot of researchers would disagree with the statement "That’s not how science works: You don’t sign a contract to not change anything in your protocol as the research evolves" You've got to complete the test using the protocol and hypotheses established at the outset. If you decide a change in protocol is required you wrap up the original test, report on the results, and then start a new test. Otherwise you end up with some combination of the issues described in A menagerie of messed up data analyses and how to avoid them[1] [1] http://simplystatistics.org/2016/02/01/a-menagerie-of-messed-up-data-analyses-and-how-to-avoid-them/ http://simplystatistics.org/2016/02/01/a-menagerie-of-messed...
- RickHull 11y agoYes, from what I can tell, Bialystok is explicitly violating the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms, particularly with "How much would I win by ..." and denial of Skepticism.
- mattlutze 11y ago> Bialystok is not. “That’s not how science works: You don’t sign a contract to not change anything in your protocol as the research evolves,” she says. She's unfortunately right -- all too often protocol, hypotheses and analytical technique are changed to fit each other, reach a p-value of 0.05 and achieve publication. For this reason among many there may indeed be value in sticking to original protocols and having to publish results. Negative and unclear results can be as useful as positive results, and what's ultimately published may end up less biased as well, which would be another plus.
- rwmurrayVT 11y agoThere is a very bitter fight over it. In Quebec the law forces children to go through school in French. A great deal of tech companies have fled and a great deal of innovation in general has fled. No one would move to SV if their children were forced to suffer through school in a complete foreign language.
- ant6n 11y agoThe companies fled in the 90ies. Not really now. And it's only _public_ education that's in French, and only if neither parent has gone to an English school in Canada.
- Nullabillity 11y agoI'm trilingual, and two of those are definitely not useful.
- stonemetal 11y ago>Since no one would argue that knowing an extra language is not useful, Why would no one argue that? If I am a person from Kansas I am never going to run into anyone who doesn't speak English. Where is the usefulness in learning any other language?
- S4M 11y agoWhat if you go on holiday abroad? What if you want to do a contract job for a Chinese/French/Spanish/South American/Japanese/German company? What if your company is selling something to a foreign company and they need someone to speak with their technical team that doesn't have a good English speaker?
- NoGravitas 11y agoHell, what if you go on holiday to Florida, Texas, or California? You will definitely want enough Spanish to order from a food truck if you want to get the most out of your visit.
- vehementi 11y agoHow did you determine that Kansas people will never in their lives encounter non-English speaking people? Are you asserting Kansas people do not ever travel and nobody visits Kansas and Kansas people could not possibly have a reason to talk to non-English people on the internet (for business or personal reasons)?
- leojg 11y agoKnowing a language is more than knowing how to speak it, in the process of learning it you learn how the culture that created it thinks and acts. There are words that are exclusive to one language or the other and say a lot of the people who speak it. Learning a language is, I think, as learning to play an instrument is more a cultural and leisure activity that might be useful sometime and helps to connect with other people and cultures.
- larsiusprime 11y agoPresumably they also have the internet in Kansas, giving you potential access to all sorts of different languages.
- jordigh 11y agoIn Québec, a number of people believe that being bilingual is merely an excuse to not learn French, and thus they feel that bilingualism encroaches upon French. They reason that if you see a sign that is both in English and French, then you'll feel no need to learn French, and thus French would lose ground. Since there is English all around Québec, English is in no similar peril. There may be some merit to this theory, in view of the fate of Welsh or Gaelic in the British Isles, or of French in Louisiana or the Canadian Maritimes. It may well be that Québec's stubbornness against English is the only thing that is keeping the language alive. Even so, I wish that true bilinguals, of which there are many, especially in the Montréal area, would not become the collateral damage of this fight.
- masklinn 11y ago> In Québec, a number of people believe that being bilingual is merely an excuse to not learn French, and thus they feel that bilingualism encroaches upon French. That's a completely different meaning of bilingualism. The article is about people's bilingualism (so canadian speaking both english and french) not about bilingual signage.
- jordigh 11y agoQuebeckers against bilingualism don't see a real difference. In their view, signage or services (such as schools) in both languages endanger the status of French. At least, that's how I understand their position.
- masklinn 11y agoAgain that's a different meaning of bilingualism, the article is about people fluent in multiple languages. I assume most Quebeckers are bilingual as is.
- jordigh 11y agoNo. Most Quebeckers are not bilingual, and many of them do not want to be bilingual, as they believe that if they became bilingual, French would lose status. They really do mean all meanings of bilingualism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_demographics_of_Quebec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_demographics_of_Quebe...
- __cato 11y ago> But so far no one has seen a disadvantage either. Right? No, researchers have found disadvantages to bilingualism. Bilinguals tend to know fewer words in their first language than monolinguals [1]. Bilinguals also experience more tip-of-the-tongue moments [2,3] and are slower in picture-naming tasks than monolinguals [2]. [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201306/do-they-know-many-words https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201306/d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue#Effects_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue#Effects_of_b... [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862226/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862226/
- mitchtbaum 11y agoSo what? Monolinguals have less data to process. Slower processing is a natural result of having more code to run. Multilinguals could simply practice quick retrieval if they need to optimize for such a specific environment. I will gladly trade needing to add that practice, if I would ever find myself with an evolutionary pressure to act quickly and monolingually in such an odd environment as that test, in favor of having multiple analytical frameworks and communication means, which I find extremely well suited for this complex world I find myself in today. For vocabulary size, I would greatly appreciate any interesting correlations. By itself, it seems like a measure without any use, because number of words and depth of understanding seem unrelated, imho.. Number of concepts and number of connections between concepts... now that seems interesting.. something which multiple languages would actually help :)
- patorjk 11y ago__cato is just pointing out that there are disadvantages, since the comment he's responding to isn't aware of any. In fact, before their comment, I wasn't aware there were disadvantages, all I'd heard is that there were advantages to being bilingual. You many think these are small things, but they're interesting and they're backed up by studies.
- mitchtbaum 11y ago
- lmm 11y agoTime is at a premium during childhood. I think many children resent having to spend time on something pointless.
- Retric 11y agoWasting 10's of thousands of hours for millions of people is hardly 'free'.
- escherize 11y agoOpportunity cost is a disadvantage.
- _fizz_buzz_ 11y agoThis seems like an interesting study also. Bilingual skills enhance stroke recovery, study finds: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-34879608 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-3487...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- khaannn 11y agoBeing bilingual is just another proxy for a middle class or higher upbringing.
- koolba 11y ago> Being bilingual is just another proxy for a middle class or higher upbringing. ... or you could be raised by immigrants who continue to speak their mother tongue at home while the children learn English (or whatever else is the primary language) via TV/School/Public. There's nothing higher upbringing about retaining your parents' culture. If anything, it's more associated with lower class families.
- geomark 11y agoDepends a lot on where you live. Live in a lower class Hispanic neighborhood? Both English and Spanish would be pretty essential.
- phillc73 11y agoI believe that's almost completely false. My wife was raised in a country where one language was spoken in the house, but she was taught at school in a completely different language. Absolutely nothing to do with being middle class or having a higher upbringing. It was mandated by the State that she be taught in one language, but they couldn't force a local population to completely change their mother tongue in the home and in private. There are many other situations I can imagine, and know of first hand, where people of all socio-economic levels speak more than one language. The only time I can think bilingualism may be such a proxy is in a largely mono-linguistic culture.
- junto 11y agoI think there is an elephant in the room here. There is no easy way to have a control subject. Each person they test has a unique set of abilities and intelligence level. My children are bilingual, and I know many other families that have children who are being brought up in a bilingual environment. I have an example of a bilingual child that didn't say anything almost at all until they were 2.5 years old. My daughter has language skills that are advanced for her age in comparison to her monolingual peers of the same age. But she is just bright (parental bias I know). My younger son appears to be improving even faster, but then he has a bilingual older sibling, so that isn't a surprise. The point is that it all depends on the person, as to how well they can adapt to a bilingual upbringing. They are so many factors involved, that it becomes impossible to categorically compare one person against another. Apples to oranges, every single time.
- geomark 11y agoMy son is growing up bilingual. It's natural since mother and father have different first languages. I've been amazed since age 4 how easily he switches between the two languages. I'll be talking to him in English and he will turn to his mother and repeat the whole conversation in his other language without missing a beat. He is also picking up Mandarin from watching videos on YouTube. I have no way of knowing if his "executive function" (ok, I'll go with that term) is better because of it. But learning to speak more than one language appears to be very easy for kids.
- iolothebard 11y agoFrom my understanding it's not the learning that's easier, it's the fact that the brain tunes itself to the local languages by a certain (early) age. I'd love to learn tonal languages but I have an extraordinarily hard time with them (Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese). I've learned French, German, Italian and Spanish with very little difficulty.
- geomark 11y agoSame for me with tonal language. At first I couldn't even hear the tones when given examples of 3 Thai words with the same spelling but different tones and hence different meanings. Eventually I got it and do pretty well now.
- mitchtbaum 11y agoSadly, this article seems like a twisted joke. Nearly every single non-"modern world" human with working legs speaks\spoke multiple languages, since in every direction you can find another potentially highly varied society living there. Primates have immense curiosity, and we generally like to socialize, even beyond our own familiar communities (innately at least). This inherently puts us among diverse environments, speakers, and interesting cultures (barring any violent opposition to free movement). What would language skills have anything to do with this non-existent "executive system" anyway? (tfa mentions someone's guess about picking which language to use in any given moment.. something I've only ever seen novices and newcomers struggle with briefly, and only in conversation, not at all with internal dialogue.) I only resort to language when I need high level processing; and then having many angles of analysis can help enormously. When I need to focus on something, I do it as I envisioned or practiced and with kinaesthetic feedback (what other way is there?); language and other analytical tools inherently go another direction than working with my material environment. Fundamentally, these psychologists' messy model of language's relationship to localized brain functions in top-down systems falls flat on its face with this "executive function" concept mixing focus and inhibitory control with (yet another overly broad concept) "problem solving", which they then hold up as a sacrificial cost to something great.
- iolothebard 11y agoBeing bilingual helped me understand English grammar in a way I wouldn't have otherwise. It also helped my writing skills immensely (IMO). Taking college junior/senior level French literature classes was extraordinarily difficult but rewarding. I did more work for my one French class than I did for five junior/senior level business classes (Finance/Accounting/MIS). It's why I eventually stopped, that and I realized I don't like evaluating literature in English, much less French (they didn't have business language classes at my Uni in the 1990s).
- dwaltrip 11y agoAnother example of the reproducibility problem in psych studies. I really think every study should be registered ahead of time. Negative and mixed results are just as important.
- tokenadult 11y agoI especially like the comment that picks up the information from the article that psychological experiments in general (one might say science studies in general) have to be reviewed for reproducibility. The article cites some good sources on that issue. "But ultimately, this isn’t about whether it’s better to know more languages or not. It’s about how science is done, and what counts as decent evidence. It’s about the role of outsiders, and whether they’re best-placed to see through the biases that permeate a field, or incapable of judging it on technical grounds. And it’s about how researchers negotiate disagreements of opinion." For bilingualism as such, I'll mention that my list of languages learned as second languages (I'm a native speaker of General American English who grew up in the United States) is on my Hacker News user profile. My wife (from Taiwan) and I were quite consistent about bringing up our oldest son (born in the United States, brought up partly in Taiwan) as a bilingual native speaker of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) and English. Some of my younger children are less completely bilingual, but all are comfortable with the project of studying other modern languages. Taiwan's history since World War II is quite interesting, because after the Republic of China Nationalist Party of China (KMT) regime regained control of Taiwan at the end of the war, the school policy was that school lessons all had to be taught in Mandarin. But the local people in Taiwan mostly spoke Taiwanese (my wife's native language) or Hakka, cognate but not mutually intelligible Sinitic languages. So the whole postwar generation went to school, from first grade on, entirely in a foreign language. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese at home and Mandarin at school (pupils were fined if they spoke the wrong language at school) and she now habitually speaks to her older siblings in Mandarin, even though her whole family in that generation are native speakers of Taiwanese. Some of our nieces in Taiwan, essentially all from Taiwanese or half-Taiwanese families, are more proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese. The KMT regime succeeded in switching the majority language in Taiwan (also through control of radio broadcasting and movie production in the days of the former dictatorship) and the school pupils learned a lot even when Taiwan was dirt poor despite going to school in a foreign language. And the level of knowledge of English over there is pretty high too--my wife began study of English as a compulsory school lesson at the beginning of junior high, and I think English is now a primary school subject. So bilingualism is perfectly doable, if a country puts its mind to bilingualism. Even language change is possible in just two generations.