To compare apples to apples you need to look at a given sample that have engaged in the same amount of effort and compare it to another group that has engaged i

To compare apples to apples you need to look at a given sample that have engaged in the same amount of effort and compare it to another group that has engaged in the same amount of effort. For instance the media representation of the chess prodigy completely misses out that our 'prodigy' has been studying chess beyond full time for 6+ years. How does this compare to adults who study chess as a beyond full time job for 6 years? Well it's tough to say since almost nobody actually does this. Laszlo Polgar's experiment is tangential but an interesting aside here at least on the notion of 'conventional wisdom'. Polgar wanted to perform an experiment on the nature of mastery of something (mathematics/music/chess/etc) being a matter of work rather than some natural talent as was, and remains the view of 'conventional wisdom.' After some consideration he decided to use chess, something he had no particular talent in, as his test bed -- and announced beforehand that he would create a master. He found a wife (also of no meaningful chess talent) willing to participate and they had a child which was their experiment subject. In fact the experiment was made doubling interesting by the fact that he had a girl. Then another. Then another. "Conventional wisdom verifies" that girls tend to do worse at chess than boys. Those children were Susan[1], Sofia[2], and Judit [3]. He created 2 grandmasters, and one international master. Judit becoming the 8th highest rated player in the world! Language is another interesting example. I enjoy traveling and know many people that became fluent in languages as adults. And the vast majority tend to share one thing in common - they were forcefully immersed in the language. Cutting out the abstracts there - they tend to have wives or girlfriends that speak little to no english. There's no chicken or egg there, they invariably learned the language after moving in with the person. I expect you'll find the children that are genuinely trilingual (and not I took 4 years of spanish in school and can kind of speak it passably type 'fluent') will be made up heavily of children where multiple languages were spoken in their household - the same sort of 'forcible immersion.' [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polgar [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r