6 ms·

Bilingualism makes the mind sharper (and helps forestall Alzheimer's)

37 points by Jun8 15y ago

Jun8 15y ago
Interesting: "We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important."
- ignifero 15y ago
  One of the peculiar things about language acquisition is that children learn it much better than one would expect. It's the "Poverty of the stimulus" paradox that led Chomsky to assert innate capacity to process grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus
- wccrawford 15y ago
  Especially since I don't think we were taught grammar until we were 8-10, where I'm from. At that age, I couldn't have possibly answered that question because I wouldn't know what grammar is. I suspect that they didn't use the word grammar, but somehow got around it, asking if the sentence was correctly formed or something. Of course, it's also possible that having parents teach you 2 languages practically forces them to teach about grammar early on, so they had an unfair advantage.
  - ma2rten 15y ago
    Generally parents don't teach their children about grammar when they bring them up bilingually. One parent just talks in one language to the child and the other parent in the other language. At least that was the case for me. But I can very well image, that you gain a better understanding of grammar, when you speak two languages, almost by definition. This trick is also used in Natural Language Processing to improve part-of-speech tagging.
- algorias 15y ago
  I can attest to that. When I was 9, we moved to another country and I had to learn Spanish from scratch. A year or so later, I still couldn't speak without an accent and still had a small vocabulary, but I vastly outperformed most of my classmates in orthography and grammar.
- T-R 15y ago
  One thing I've noticed as I've learned other languages is that I've become very keenly aware of, for example, all of the different definitions/parts of speech of the word "that" (each translates differently and takes different parts of speech as its object), and consequently how I structure my sentences. Of course, part of that could also be a result of my tendency to think about grammatical correctness in terms of type systems.
  - ma2rten 15y ago
    Funny, because English is not my native language, but I would have no idea what the different meanings of 'that' would be.
    - patio11 15y ago
      There are at least a dozen common constructions which use that. Indicative that: "Which apple do you want?" "That apple." "This apple?" "No, that apple." Causative that: "Why did you go to school?" "So that I could study Japanese." Antecedent that, where that takes the place of some concept which has come before: "Did you study Japanese?" "That is a given." "Never going to see it outside of literary constructions" that: "That which cannot be seen is more real than that which cannot be felt." Adjectival-clause-introducing that: "We are looking for two students that are studying language pedagogy." etc, etc English grammar, fun stuff.
      - Jun8 15y ago
        While looking at the Wikipedia entry for definite article, I found that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Definite_articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Definite_...) that was derived from þæt, the neuter singular form of the in Middle English. Fascinating stuff!
      - riffraff 15y ago
        pardon this non-native, but shouldn't "We are looking for two students that are studying language pedagogy." be "We are looking for two students _who_ are studying language pedagogy." or possibly _which_ ? Or are they equivalent?
- ignifero 15y ago
  I suspect it's because you don't really learn what grammar or syntax is until you have to (i.e. until you learn a second language). For the same reason, you don't know what is "incorrect syntax", since people rarely make syntactical errors after childhood.
kragen 15y ago
(obligatory correlation does not imply causation comment) The authors did go to some effort to rule out other causes of correlation, though: "The effect does not appear to be attributable to such possible confounding factors as education, occupational status, or immigration. Bilingualism thus appears to contribute to cognitive reserve, which acts to compensate for the effects of accumulated neuropathology."
bmohlenhoff 15y ago
So do you think that "speaking" multiple computer languages counts the same as speaking multiple spoken languages, in terms of mental fitness and the other benefits outlined by this study? Obviously something like C++ isn't as complicated as something like Japanese, but still I wonder if programming-related skills like the ability to work concurrently at multiple levels of abstraction also prevent cognitive decline.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  When you're programming in Ruby, do you mentally shift into Ruby mode, or do you translate everything from English into Ruby? Bilinguals don't translate from 1 language to another, they actually think in that language while using it, to the point that you can actually see attitude changes based on which language they are using. I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using.
  - lemming 15y ago
    I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using. Really? I think the only time I do this is when something is sufficiently tricky that I probably have to draw it to work out what it should be doing ("Ok, so I pass this in here, and then it could flow through to here or here..."). Otherwise, assuming I'm sufficiently fluent in the language I'm programming in it just "flows" out, as when I'm speaking in Spanish (a second language I speak well) - there's no intermediate translation from English in either case.
    - wccrawford 15y ago
      Interesting. I've been disturbed by my inability to stop translating when trying to understand and speak Japanese, but I've also noticed I'm not as bothered by translating as most people seem to be. (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) Coding is the same way... I think "I'll loop over that" and then proceed to write out how to do it in whatever programming language I'm working with. Sometimes I even write comments in English and then go back and fill in the code that does what the comments want.
stygianguest 15y ago
If it forestalls Alzheimer's there should be significantly more of it in the exceptionally monolingual Anglophone world compared to the rest of us. Can't find any evidence in that direction, other factors such as longlivity and simple genetics probably interfere too much.
Apocryphon 15y ago
What about trilingual or quadlingual people?
- rmc 15y ago
  I would assume that they are rare enough to make study easy.
- nebaneba 15y ago
  As mental exercise, it's certainly helpful, but the marginal benefit is probably lower than going from monolingual to bilingual. The second language is crucial because it provides basis for comparison. If all you've ever used is Internet Explorer, that's the entirety of your internet experience. But if you've tried just another browser, you learn to appreciate the difference.

37 points by Jun8 15y ago

Jun8 15y ago

Interesting: "We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important."

ignifero 15y ago
One of the peculiar things about language acquisition is that children learn it much better than one would expect. It's the "Poverty of the stimulus" paradox that led Chomsky to assert innate capacity to process grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus
wccrawford 15y ago
Especially since I don't think we were taught grammar until we were 8-10, where I'm from. At that age, I couldn't have possibly answered that question because I wouldn't know what grammar is. I suspect that they didn't use the word grammar, but somehow got around it, asking if the sentence was correctly formed or something. Of course, it's also possible that having parents teach you 2 languages practically forces them to teach about grammar early on, so they had an unfair advantage.
- ma2rten 15y ago
  Generally parents don't teach their children about grammar when they bring them up bilingually. One parent just talks in one language to the child and the other parent in the other language. At least that was the case for me. But I can very well image, that you gain a better understanding of grammar, when you speak two languages, almost by definition. This trick is also used in Natural Language Processing to improve part-of-speech tagging.
algorias 15y ago
I can attest to that. When I was 9, we moved to another country and I had to learn Spanish from scratch. A year or so later, I still couldn't speak without an accent and still had a small vocabulary, but I vastly outperformed most of my classmates in orthography and grammar.
T-R 15y ago
One thing I've noticed as I've learned other languages is that I've become very keenly aware of, for example, all of the different definitions/parts of speech of the word "that" (each translates differently and takes different parts of speech as its object), and consequently how I structure my sentences. Of course, part of that could also be a result of my tendency to think about grammatical correctness in terms of type systems.
- ma2rten 15y ago
  Funny, because English is not my native language, but I would have no idea what the different meanings of 'that' would be.
  - patio11 15y ago
    There are at least a dozen common constructions which use that. Indicative that: "Which apple do you want?" "That apple." "This apple?" "No, that apple." Causative that: "Why did you go to school?" "So that I could study Japanese." Antecedent that, where that takes the place of some concept which has come before: "Did you study Japanese?" "That is a given." "Never going to see it outside of literary constructions" that: "That which cannot be seen is more real than that which cannot be felt." Adjectival-clause-introducing that: "We are looking for two students that are studying language pedagogy." etc, etc English grammar, fun stuff.
    - Jun8 15y ago
      While looking at the Wikipedia entry for definite article, I found that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Definite_articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Definite_...) that was derived from þæt, the neuter singular form of the in Middle English. Fascinating stuff!
    - riffraff 15y ago
      pardon this non-native, but shouldn't "We are looking for two students that are studying language pedagogy." be "We are looking for two students _who_ are studying language pedagogy." or possibly _which_ ? Or are they equivalent?
ignifero 15y ago
I suspect it's because you don't really learn what grammar or syntax is until you have to (i.e. until you learn a second language). For the same reason, you don't know what is "incorrect syntax", since people rarely make syntactical errors after childhood.

kragen 15y ago

(obligatory correlation does not imply causation comment) The authors did go to some effort to rule out other causes of correlation, though: "The effect does not appear to be attributable to such possible confounding factors as education, occupational status, or immigration. Bilingualism thus appears to contribute to cognitive reserve, which acts to compensate for the effects of accumulated neuropathology."

bmohlenhoff 15y ago

So do you think that "speaking" multiple computer languages counts the same as speaking multiple spoken languages, in terms of mental fitness and the other benefits outlined by this study? Obviously something like C++ isn't as complicated as something like Japanese, but still I wonder if programming-related skills like the ability to work concurrently at multiple levels of abstraction also prevent cognitive decline.

wccrawford 15y ago
When you're programming in Ruby, do you mentally shift into Ruby mode, or do you translate everything from English into Ruby? Bilinguals don't translate from 1 language to another, they actually think in that language while using it, to the point that you can actually see attitude changes based on which language they are using. I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using.
- lemming 15y ago
  I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using. Really? I think the only time I do this is when something is sufficiently tricky that I probably have to draw it to work out what it should be doing ("Ok, so I pass this in here, and then it could flow through to here or here..."). Otherwise, assuming I'm sufficiently fluent in the language I'm programming in it just "flows" out, as when I'm speaking in Spanish (a second language I speak well) - there's no intermediate translation from English in either case.
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    Interesting. I've been disturbed by my inability to stop translating when trying to understand and speak Japanese, but I've also noticed I'm not as bothered by translating as most people seem to be. (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) Coding is the same way... I think "I'll loop over that" and then proceed to write out how to do it in whatever programming language I'm working with. Sometimes I even write comments in English and then go back and fill in the code that does what the comments want.

stygianguest 15y ago

If it forestalls Alzheimer's there should be significantly more of it in the exceptionally monolingual Anglophone world compared to the rest of us. Can't find any evidence in that direction, other factors such as longlivity and simple genetics probably interfere too much.

Apocryphon 15y ago

What about trilingual or quadlingual people?

rmc 15y ago
I would assume that they are rare enough to make study easy.
nebaneba 15y ago
As mental exercise, it's certainly helpful, but the marginal benefit is probably lower than going from monolingual to bilingual. The second language is crucial because it provides basis for comparison. If all you've ever used is Internet Explorer, that's the entirety of your internet experience. But if you've tried just another browser, you learn to appreciate the difference.