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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
- anon223345 4y ago“Measure what is measureable”
- pizzaknife 4y agoi feel so cheated - adnd has some explaining to do
- gxt 4y agoAnybody got a link to the full paper? Being bilingual myself I find the conclusion at odds with my anecdata. I'm curious to know what were the tests were and corrected factors.
- ofalkaed 4y agoIt absolutely adds advantage to those interested in literature, it allows you to see your first language outside itself and generally increases your understanding of your first language. I would consider that a cognitive advantage but it is not exactly an advantage for the general public. Interestingly (at least to me) I have found programming languages* even more beneficial in this sense which I also find ironic, stem sorts often seem to miss the nuances of spoken/written language but as a humanities sort the hard line logical brutality of programming languages has given me valuable perspective on the nuances of the spoken languages. *I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort
- version_five 4y agoSounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests. I'm certainly in the camp that bilingualism is helpful in all sorts of ways, and is almost an objective way to be "smarter" - but if the paper's legit, presumably bilingualism doesn't automatically boost other cognitive functions (somehow I picture those things where you have to say which shape comes next)
- ofalkaed 4y ago>Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests. Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.
- jacquesm 4y agoAnd it also helps wonders in acquiring a third language, which can be very useful in its own right. When all you know is the language you were raised with adding another is hard work, once you have that second one the next one is so much easier. But I readily believe that knowing another language isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography. It wouldn't make much sense, if anything I would expect you to be less good at other subjects because you've just filled up a bunch of your brain with knowledge leaving less room for other things assuming your storage is finite.
- ofalkaed 4y agoI would probably say if you are going to go to learning a third language than you would probably have been better off studying linguistics instead of that second language which will make all language acquisition easier. But hindsight, how many learn a second language with the intent of learning a third or forth? and once you learn that third you probably are going to have a decent intuitive grasp on linguistics even if you can not maintain a discussion with a linguistics major.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI am a mild pariah among my parent friends for suggesting that 'spanish immersion daycare' was a way of recruiting lower-cost childcare workers (in the USA). They're everywhere, and it seems they are the most common type of daycare, actually. (upper midwest, usa)
- Spooky23 4y agoIt also makes it easier to get daycare subsidies for working parents.
- version_five 4y agoSort of related: in english Canada, french immersion often ends up being a way to send your kids to a better public school, and for whatever reason the english / french kids (as in enrolled in those programs) tend to split along socioeconomic lines.
- hydrok9 4y agoand they often get away with a low level of fluency by the end of it.
- mpsprd 4y agoI'm curious about how french immersion works in English speaking Canada. It's something seen as "higher class"? I live the mirror situation: french speaking young parent intending to make my child bilingual at a young age. Here english is obviously seen as an edge and is studied a lot.
- cfraenkel 4y agoIt's seen as a step up in quality, but almost entirely because you're self selecting into the pool of parents who are more invested into improved education. There's also a sense that the "problem" kids are going to be concentrated in the English track. So win win.
- ckz 4y agoI'd be curious to learn/chat more about how you're approaching it as a French-speaking parent. :) I'm a native English speaker/~B1 French speaker trying to very intentionally create a bilingual household environment. It's not pure immersion, but I can (and do) narrate what I'm doing for most daily activities in French, read aloud in French, consume French audio, etc. All much to the bemusement of my own French mentor, who's validated that I'm not instilling a terrible accent, but is also getting peppered with questions in my search for French children's literature.
- kranke155 4y agoWithout access to the actual Paper I don’t know anything about the cognitive test that was performed, so no idea what to think of it. Without the actual Paper we are just reading a footnote.
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoThat seems to reflect my lived experience. Do bilingual people in general seem to be more intelligent? I don't think so. But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you. That doesn't mean you can have the tool and immediately gain the benefits of having it. It just means that compared to someone who does not have the ability to speak a second language, you have less friction to access domains of knowledge locked behind languages other than your native tongue. Having a second car doesn't automatically mean I travel more. But if I used that other one specifically for roadtrips, it puts me in a category of people that is far smaller than the general population or even the general population of drivers.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoIf 'bilingualism' is expanded to include math and programming languages I would say it does effect intelligence directly. But then again I haven't met many super-geniuses to compare against.
- elbigbad 4y agoIf “bilingualism” is expanded even further to include having wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard, I would say it does have an effect on outcomes.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoI don't get your sarcasm. How do 'wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard' constitute a language in any form?
- elbigbad 4y agoUgh, you’re right. I guess they’re as orthogonal to bilingualism and spoken languages as programming languages and math are. My mistake.
- Cenk 4y agoLink to PDF: https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf
- eru 4y agoThanks. That was an interesting read.
- gumby 4y agoI am surprised that someone might think it should. When I consider my extended family, more than half of them use two or even three languages on a daily basis but in terms of “smarts” seem to be normally distributed, with no special correlation in this regard. So I’m unsurprised by the conclusion of a rigorous and larger study.
- seizethecheese 4y agoThis is just an observational study. It seems fairly useless for understanding whether a given person will be smarter if they learn a second language. Looks like the “controlled for” socioeconomic status, but I doubt this fully captures the difference in populations between bilingual and non-bilingual people. It could be that the population of bilingual people, had they not been bilingual, might have scored lower on these tests, and therefore being bilingual brought them up to par. Impossible to tell.
- ptelomere 4y ago[dead]
- johndhi 4y agoWelp that confirms it. I'll never learn another language.
- ekianjo 4y agoA study looking at the wrong variables, again...
- bugglebeetle 4y agoA result that can only be surprising in places where monolingualism is the norm, like the US, and knowledge of other languages (outside of those acquired from one’s family) is taken as a sign of erudition. If you’ve ever spent time in countries like Switzerland, you’d know their are plenty of people who speak 2 or more languages but are otherwise of average intelligence.
- lisasays 4y agoSwitzerland is a bad example, because it's socially and multilingual. Whereas if one looks at basically monolingual societies (e.g. most of the countries in Europe) one find that not only is not everyone bilingual (and no, "everyone" does not speak English) -- multilingualism definitely correlates with class and education.
- bugglebeetle 4y agoWhy would Switzerland be a bad example in this context? The point of the study is that bilingualism does not afford cognitive advantage, so you have to consider countries where bilingualism is not associated with the factors you cite to see if this bears out. Pointing at other countries that function in the same way as the US in regard to a dominant language would just demonstrate more of the same as is found there.
- lisasays 4y agoMost people live in countries that are basically monolingual ("dominant" as you say), though not in the the naive, sheltered way that the US is.
- makeitdouble 4y agoIt's understandably hard to get actual numbers on the proportion of bilingual people. There is a semi-random 50% number thrown around, but just to take the two biggest countries, there's no way we get accurate data on people in India and China given their size and lack of reporting of the inner regions. In China in particular, no one will boast about being fluent in a non-official language in a survey. I think the same thing happen at smaller scale in european countries. There will be one official language, and whether people are bilingual or not won't be assessed more than striclty needed. The only study I saw were for educational purpose for small kids, out of that there will be no specific tracking of a Georgian immigrant starting a family in Germany, or a Spanish businessman being fluent in Italian because of his girlfriend.
- bena 4y agoThis might be a thing where the correlation was the other way, so people got it in their heads that doing the thing would make them smarter. Like any time you see an article about how intelligent people drink more coffee, or swear more, or wear hats more often than others. So people start cursing into their mugs while adjusting their caps. And, it might be true. It probably is true. But none of those things made them intelligent. So intelligent people might have been more likely to have learned and spoke a second language. But that didn't make them intelligent. So aping the trappings of intelligence won't make you intelligent.
- crispyambulance 4y agoThis is just an anecdotal data point but my mother was bilingual and near the end of her life had a stroke. It impacted her language-- but mostly for English, not nearly as much her native language. She could understand both English and Italian, but would almost entirely speak Italian, not even realizing which language she was speaking. Is that a "cognitive advantage"? Maybe? I am not qualified to answer that. But to me it suggests that perhaps more "real-estate" in the brain takes on language when one is bilingual.
- dron57 4y agoI'm not a neuroscientist, but as I understand it losing a particular ability is usually a sign of brain damage. It is likely that she learned English as an adult (or older than a toddler at least) and it was being stored in a more specific and more constrained area of the brain.
- cmcconomy 4y agoi think the point here was that it might be useful to have language redundancy so that brain damage which robs you of one language may leave you with some of your backups
- joseda-hg 4y agoSomeone close to me suffered something similar, she lost Spanish but kept the ability to speak Lithuanian (Her native language) shortly before her death, doctor commented that it was something he had seen before It made treatment complex, because no one knew enough Lithuanian to communicate to the degree necesary
- cgarrigue 4y agoYes, depending on where the stroke/aneurysm the effect can be totally different. I had one a few years ago, I was still able to chat with my colleagues and the hospital staff in Japanese and English, as well as in French (my native language) with my family back in France. However when looking at texts in French or English, I was recognizing the letters but putting them together I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind them. It took me a few days before being able to decipher them again, but it took me 3 weeks before recovering a decent reading speed. But some blood that had escaped in my skull at that time was blocking some nerves linked to the vision, so I had a dead angle of around 45 degrees on my right side until the blood naturally disappeared.
- cubefox 4y agoThis seems mainly interesting for people from English-speaking countries, since everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.
- lisasays 4y agoEveryone else nowadays is bilingual anyway. Uh, no. According to statistics (and everyday observation), slightly less than half of "everyone" is.
- cubefox 4y agoI think those are older people who didn't learn English in school.
- lisasays 4y agoOr they're from somewhere besides Europe: English is not very widely spoken in Mexico overall, with only around 12% of the population speaking it, and only a small number of these being truly fluent. Estimates are that only 5% of Brazilians can speak English, and most of those speakers are middle- and upper-class professionals living in larger cities. etc.
- cubefox 4y agoInteresting
- cpursley 4y agoEveryone? I’m the only one in my large American family (all the way through to second cousins, etc) or friend groups (excluding foreign born) who has any competency in any foreign language - and not even to fluency. Monolingual is the norm in the US with the exception of Spanish speaking immigrants.
- oblio 4y agoRe-read their comment.
- paulsutter 4y agoIt would be pretty easy to come up with criteria that support or dismiss benefits of learning two languages, or any pair of specialties at all given inherent tradeoffs For example, folks who learn programming languages early and intensively have a certain analytical advantage. But this is not a positive in all situations. We all have limited energy/time/focus, so each area we learn necessarily costs us in other areas. And that’s great. We should develop strengths and build on them. Our lives are short and our attention is limited
- AdrenalinMd 4y agoAs someone fluent in four languages*, I agree. I would even argue that the opposite of an advantage is true. Consider this: it adds unnecessary cognitive load. When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful! I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice. When you can focus on fewer languages, your proficiency in them improves. Although I can speak four languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help. The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it. Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others. *My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either. I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pb7 4y agoI am also originally from Moldova and speak the same 4 languages. If I had to guess, this is fairly common in Moldova -- at least in private schools. I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't. English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own. Edit: Spanish is probably on par with the others.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- makeitdouble 4y agoI couldn't get access to the article, and the abstract gives no relevant detail to what they are assessing on which subjects... do the other commenters have an access to it, or could eventually tell us more about how this study was done ? Edit: pdf here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682016&goto=item%3Fid%3D35681824%2335682016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682016&goto=item%3Fid...
- booleandilemma 4y agoI'm not too surprised. The advantage of learning another language is a social one. You increase the number of people you can speak with, thereby increasing your opportunities in life. Compare someone living in the US who can speak English versus someone who can't. I hope they tackle "left-handed people are better at math" at some point. That's another one I'm tired of hearing about.
- tnel77 4y agoMy theory: in the United States, speaking multiple languages can be a sign of coming from a more financially sound household. I wouldn’t expect a second language to be any better for the brain than studying math or learning to play an instrument. As always, the most important factor is money.
- rahimnathwani 4y agoSpeaking more than 2 languages might be such a sign. But where I live (in San Francisco) speaking exactly 2 languages is usually a sign that you or your parents are immigrants.
- albert_e 4y agoOutside the US ... the variables change a bit. India for instance -- A typical kid in many places here (especially southern part of the country) has 3 languages formally taught in school and consumed as popular media daily. Having privilege in these regions usually translates to levels of literacy like having reading ability (in addition to just speaking for trade), reading literature, speaking fluency, broader vocabulary, "better" accent, etc. -- all of which, in thousand different ways, signal one's socio-economic status in every interaction.
- cshimmin 4y agoI would be surprised if the majority of bilingual speakers in the US aren't first/second gen immigrants. Not exactly known to be "a sign of coming from" wealth
- unix_fan 4y agoSecond generation immigrants struggle to speak the language of their parents, however. This happens at least with immigrants from my country to the U.S.
- costco 4y agoI think this it. In Michigan public schools at least there are mandatory language courses for 2 years but these do not get most people anywhere close to fluency. Apparently I'm qualified enough to get a 4 on AP German but at my peak I could only get about 60% of your typical Der Spiegel headline. Everyone I know that knows another language at at least roughly a C1 level knows it because of family. But I imagine there are some people with tutors or better schools who start early with a language and probably end up pretty good at it.
- makeitdouble 4y agoThere is a meta analysis coming to close conclusion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641133/ The interesting part being it's done on children still in their learning phase. The current article targeting 11000 makes me think it's done in a similar setting (catching 11000 adult working people for a study is just complicated). In general when people are arguing about side effects of bilingualism, I think they care more about adults who more or less reached their full potential.
- zeroCalories 4y agoBeing raised bilingual feels like having two second languages T_T
- 999900000999 4y agoAt least in the US this is often a sign of affluence, you need to have money to attend language school after your normal classwork. I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your doing better in school than your classmates. Before you mention public school language education, your lucky if your able to read attending a public high school. I went to one myself.
- seizethecheese 4y agoThe linked study shows the opposite. Bilingual cohort was twice as likely to be low socioeconomic status. This is likely dominated by lower income immigrants.
- joseda-hg 4y agoAs with most things it depends, I went to basically the most expensive school in my state (Not in the US), and never realized that it wasn't normal for everyone to actually learn the second language everyone has to take Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different
- hackernewds 4y agoAren't there studies in Linguistics that show that the Chinese have an advantage in mathematics due to the nature of their numerical system? and conversely the French have a disadvantage?
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- lisper 4y agoThis study seems to focus on acquired languages and ignores mulitple languages learned in childhood. As someone who grew up speaking three languages (German, Hebrew and English) I feel as if this has expanded my ability to conceptualize and form abstractions because I know "what it is like" to think natively in languages with different vocabularies and syntactic structures. That comes naturally with no effort when you're young, but is nearly impossible to acquire later in life.
- seizethecheese 4y agoI think the commenters here are focusing on acquired languages, but does the study? I don’t think so, since the bilingual cohort was 2x as likely to be low socioeconomic status.
- lisper 4y agoGood point. I guess I assumed that the second language was acquired later in life because otherwise it's not really "acquiring a second language", it's "acquiring multiple languages at the same time." In looking back over this, I stumbled over this study which seems to directly contradict the one in the original link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612443836 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612443836 "This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young immigrant children challenged by poverty..." which implies that there is a "cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism". So maybe the original study is just bogus. Or maybe this one is. Who knows? Sociology doesn't have a stellar reputation for generating reproducible results.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoThis is a fun one: Bilinguals are better than monolinguals in detecting manipulative discourse https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/
- somenameforme 4y ago
- ggm 4y agoThe weak argument in favour was the ability to apply two (or more) linguistic models to rationalisations about things, and potentially uncover more in the distinctions between them. So on the abstraction/synthesis side of things.
- hippich 4y agoTo me second language added ability to express something better. I also noticed that depending on a subject I subconsciously pick one or another language when thinking about the subject. Perhaps that's not what measured in this paper, but it is certainly an advantage for me.
- EGreg 4y ago“ and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors” I would be interested to know how they managed to remove the potentially confounding factors. To me, it seems clear: bilinguals whose language isn’t a major language of the country often come from immigrant families. Immigrants have a great work ethic and teach their kids in the foreign language. Then the kids work hard to fit in and learn the other language, too. They tend to be less interested in “decadent” activities and end up overachieving. This is especially true for immigrants from formerly Communist countries that prioritized STEM. In the past, people learned Latin or German to access scientific literature etc. Not to mention that learning two DISPARATE languages enables people to triangulate better on other languages and ways of thinking
- dilawar 4y agoRemind me of an article where three anthropologists were debating what does mean to be civilized. "Knowing one language makes us human, knowing more than one language make us civilised." is the only thing I now remember from that reading. Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?
- viraptor 4y ago> Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal? I believe some society traits leak through the language and you see a little bit more context when you learn a new language. (Especially with idioms, but separate words too) The in-your-face examples I remember now are the many polite ways to say "no" without saying "no" in Japanese, and Australian tribes using absolute directions (NESW) instead of relative. But there are more subtle ones too and I think they give you a better chance to be more open.
- pazimzadeh 4y agoIt's pretty obvious to people who speak 2+ language that there are trade-offs between "going deep" in one language and having "surface-level" knowledge of many languages. The one thing they found which bilinguals might be better at has to do with digit recall, which actually agrees with previous research that bilinguals are 'more logical' in their second tongue and 'more emotional' in their native tongue. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/communicating-foreign-language-takes-emotion-out-decision-making https://news.uchicago.edu/story/communicating-foreign-langua... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-02935-000 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-02935-000 https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/04/21/bilinguals-react-more-emotionally-to-mother-tongue/#:~:text=Consistent%20with%20previous%20studies%2C%20this,a%20second%20or%20additional%20language https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/04/21/bilinguals-react.... So the results may have been different if each participant was allowed to take the test in their mother tongue. The list of things they tested is way too small to conclude that there are no general cognitive advantages. What is "general" anyway? Things they didn't test: - the ability to learn new languages - the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context clues - ability to communicate or get by in a brand new/unfamiliar environment - ability to detect BS (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/) - ability to improvise - abstract thinking (not being limited by a linear inner voice) - etc... There are many confounding factors they didn't test for. e.g., what if the bilinguals are more logical, but have weaker comprehension of the question? do those things cancel out? Or, if being multilingual makes you "overthink" prompts and maybe you get penalized on time in standardized tests, etc... According to their questionnaire, the "bilingualness" of participants was self-reported, all you had to do was enter a number between 1 and 20 for the number of languages you speak.. It would have been better if written and spoken proficiency in each of the second languages had been tested and used to correlate with the results. I could go on. I think this is actually one of the worst studies I've ever read in terms of "confidence of the title" vs. "what they actually tested."
- fnord77 4y agogarbage study! multilingualism was self-reported so they don't differentiate between someone who slept through 2 years of HS spanish and someone who grew up speaking both English and Chinese The study was also done in a single geographical location. terrible
- x62Bh7948f 4y agoHere in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment. Since my family lives abroad, I would like to teach my kids english at home and only use it in private settings, but feels weird having to hide something like that (also, half kids are sort of "expected" to speak english anyway).
- tuukkah 4y agoSounds like you may need to find a school that does not consider it a cognitive impairment, but you really should speak your native tongue to your children regardless.
- oblio 4y ago> Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment. This sounds more like the Japanese being... Japanese. And not in the good sense of the word.
- r0bot 4y agoI think biculturalism offers the advantage more than just language.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoNext you'll tell me there are no learning styles, that whole language instruction doesn't work and that college doesn't teach critical thinking /s I wonder how we end up with these "myths" in the first place. Bad research? Great marketing? How many more educational holy cows will come apart in the next decades?
- paulpauper 4y agosocial desirability bias. people think it's true because they want to believe it's true, it sounds plausible that it's true
- yosito 4y agoI feel that this study is making a very general conclusion based on very specific criteria. While I agree that knowing multiple languages often increases cognitive overhead, and probably doesn't make me superhuman smart or anything, it's a choice that does have real consequences on my abilities. Depending on the context I find myself in, it may be more useful or not. If I'm traveling around Europe, being conversational in five European languages is extremely beneficial. If I'm taking an IQ test in a lab in Iowa, knowing five European languages probably won't give me any benefit and might actually make me slower to recall the relevant things for the test. We get good at the skills we practice, and there is absolutely a benefit from practicing the skills that are relevant to our lives. Personally, one of the main benefits I get from knowing multiple languages is that it helps me to reason about abstract meaning and understand how to communicate clearly across cultural and linguistic lines. That's a very useful skill for developing apps that are used internationally and for living a lifestyle where I'm constantly context-switching into different cultures. I'm a native English speaker, and one thing I've noticed is that people who only speak English are often the worst communicators because they don't realize how ambiguous their language is, how much slang they're using, and how difficult they are to understand for someone who grew up in a different context. Is it a cognitive advantage to be able to communicate better with a diverse group of people? I don't know. Not according to this study.
- teki_one 4y agoIt might be true, but it only means that don't learn/teach languages to gain cognitive advantages. As a tool language is useful for many things. Gaining access to other culture(s) is one of the most amazing ones for me.
- travisgriggs 4y agoI've felt that being multi lingual, a virtual form of world travel, usually benefits people socially, and society in general, but have always figured there was zero cognitive "edge" it gave me others.
- swellguy 4y agoDismissing an important skillset by pretending it could be magical is called clickbait. The advantage of knowing a second language is to be able to communicate and understand a new segment of humanity. This is like creating a paper: being able to pump gas into your car affords no general improvement in hair growth on your toes.
- rippercushions 4y agoThe paper is tapping on a long-standing debate about the effects of being bilingual. For a long time, it was thought that being bilingual was actively harmful, and indeed it's been shown in studies that babies with parents who speak different languages to them are slower to reach some linguistic milestones. Later research showed that this was just temporary, and not only was there no negative effect, but bilingual kids tended to do better on some tests of aptitude than monolinguals. And now this study is saying that no, maybe they're not better after all. Wikipedia, as always, has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_bilingual...
- jletienne 4y agoespecially on a programming forum. Knowing Python, SQL, and R has been hugely beneficial. I can read Ruby scripts and colleagues can talk me through JS without me ever writing those. Would be surprised if knowing multiple spoken language didn't help at all!
- jmpman 4y agoUna mas cerveza por favor…
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- cjohnson318 4y agoI think the real question is: does this battery of 12 tests of executive function really measure intelligence? If so, why don't we use these when hiring engineers, CEOs, or any other valuable asset? I'm pessimistic that these tests measure intelligence in a meaningful way.
- joeyzm 4y agoBecause IQ testing is de facto illegal. Companies would much rather use them instead of proxies with varying degrees of accuracy.
- cjohnson318 4y ago> Companies would much rather use them instead of proxies with varying degrees of accuracy. I sure wouldn't. I'd much rather ask someone about relevant experience than put them through an IQ test, or similar set of abstract puzzles.
- atleastoptimal 4y agoI think this and a greater aspect of any deliberate, learned task making people "smarter" needs to be addressed. The thing is, beyond critical developmental stages in early childhood, and barring significant environmental factors like lead poisoning or brain trauma, one's general cognitive abilities are largely a genetic phenomenon.
- nayuki 4y agoI see at least one subtle advantage in being multi-lingual: distinguishing concepts more clearly. I see monolingual English speakers who confuse to/too/two, there/their/they're, etc. It's hard to blame them because these word triplets are pronounced the same, so why bother distinguishing them in writing. Knowing how these words map to different languages reinforces their distinctions. There/their/they're in Chinese are 那裏 (na li) / 他們的 (ta men de) / 他們是 (ta men shi). This goes deeper and works for homonyms like free, which maps to 免費 (no cost / gratuis) vs. 自由 (freedom / liberty). It makes you think harder about what you mean when you use the word free. Learning different languages challenges your assumptions. An Euro-centric upbringing would assume that spaces are required to separate words. Chinese and Japanese disagree with this and work just fine. 26-letter alphabet vs. thousands of characters. Implicit tones vs. prescriptive tones. Context-dependent letter shapes (Sanskrit). Optional/implied vowels (Arabic). Word order (SVO etc.).
- zirgs 4y agoFunny how the Chinese have to use that 26-letter alphabet too, because you can't put thousands of characters on a keyboard.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoSmartphones have changed this. You can write characters directly on a touchscreen. It's not as popular of an input method as pinyin, but it's not uncommon either. There's also Bopomofo, as an alternative to pinyin input.[0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- zirgs 4y agoWriting characters on a touchscreen seems horrible.
- gastlygem 4y agoYou can write the most sloppy cursive Chinese character and your phone would recognize them just fine. Together with text prediction it's quite easy to get 40 characters per minute (probably equivalent of 80wpm in English), much faster than most people writing on paper.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoOh no! What arbitrary signifier will I use now to gatekeep education level and define a class based in-group. Please, I need an answer quickly, my whole identity is based on hasty judgemental heuristics!
- innocentoldguy 4y agoI speak two languages (English and Japanese). I've never thought of it as a cognitive advantage but rather a broader degree of experience and, perhaps, wisdom.
- nanidin 4y agoI wonder how this relates to the resilience conferred against dementia / Alzheimer’s by bilingualism?
- decaffjoe 4y agoThis topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people. Who cares if your IQ went up or down half a point on account of learning to speak mandarin- your understanding of the lives of billions of people just increased dramatically. That's why it's good to learn a language- culture, not cognition.
- emodendroket 4y agoThat may be so, but if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are obvious "nos" but the assumption could stand some scrutiny.
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- MobiusHorizons 4y agoI think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.
- andrekandre 4y agonot only that but also the increased opportunities for new knowledge and experiences as well... it can open a lot of doors that would ordinarily be shut-off.
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- jasfi 4y agoThey're looking at people who likely grew up as bilingual, who they say are not generally smarter than those who only know one language. There should still be cognitive benefits to learning new languages as an adult, just as learning any new skill.
- suthakamal 4y agolol
- suthakamal 4y agoTroglodyte research done at… lol… Western.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoHow good is independent variable control in this study? The most common reason for bilingualism is things going very wrong in the birth country for either you or your parents. In which case, cognitive disadvantage is expected due to malnutrition, preventable childhood diseases, parents not being best adjusted to host country culture and education system and so on. On the other hand, voluntary bilingualism is a sign of opposite things. Even if it doesn't have an intrinsic cognitive advantage, your parents were thoughtful enough to provide that for you, which comes with a slew of both cultural and heritable factors. Your schools being able to offer successful foreign language programs is a sign of relative affluence. Plus, say if your mother tongue is English and your learn Mandarin. You are now able to better communicate with a billion people and have access to their opportunities. It's hard to imagine how this is not a practical advantage in life, any artificial benchmarks notwithstanding. I would allow that becoming bilingual in English, Spanish or Mandarin is preferable to learning something that gives you less additional reach compared to just speaking your mother tongue, where benefits are harder to quantify.
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- rxyz 4y agoThis comment is so ignorant and America-centric that it made me angry. Wow
- dumpster_fire 4y agoIt really depends on where the languages are from. I find learning languages from different worldviews helps me with judging other cultures less. Someone on this thread said something about being able to consume content in other cultures. That's totally true. There's such a large delta between the knowledge base in each language that you get to cross pollinate ideas in your daily life. There are some "feelings" and deep layers of nuance when speaking in one language that really can't be transferred to another unless you really immerse yourself in the media and literature. Also to all my fellow multilingual people making sick puns that you laugh about to yourself inside, I see you.
- typ 4y agoOne thing I find interesting about being multilingual is you can 'unlock' your different personalities and disrupt mental inertia a bit when speaking another language. It's like having one part of the brain take a break while activating other parts. But I also feel awkward speaking a different language in front of close friends when you are so used to speaking the 'default' language with them. It feels like you are exposing your other personality.
- lIl-IIIl 4y agoThat is very true. It does seem to me there's a subtle "personality shift" among some people when they speak a separate language. Sometimes you see people become warmer and more affectionate because either they know how to be that way in their native language or it's more common in their culture (e.g. seeing a native Spanish speaker speak Spanish after knowing them only speak English). There was also an interesting study about asking people solve trolley problems in their second language vs their first. Whe. Solving in their second language, the solution tended to be more utilitarian and logical.
- geoalchimista 4y agoBut it offers you one more language to communicate with people. Isn't that enough?
- DuckFeathers 4y agoBeing able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether. This is easy to deduce with reasoning and I can confirm it (to myself) from experience. What psychological "science" has to say about it makes me question their study than anything. It is important to remember however that not all bilinguals are equal. The languages have to be different enough. English, German and Swedish (all Germanic languages with very similar grammer) doesn't give you much freedom in comparision to German and Mandarin. Find people who are fluent (i.e. they can think in different languages) in two languages that are far apart in the language tree and run the study again.
- oblio 4y ago> Being able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether. I don't understand this.
- sgt 4y agoAside from that, don't underestimate the amount of thinking we do without language. What do we call that - raw braincode? So in that sense, we're all bilingual, even those only speaking English. I.e. you can think "I'm going down to the post office to post a letter with a stamp on it" without language.
- DuckFeathers 4y agoTrue. But for single-language speakers (and even some bilinguals who haven't thought about this), it is easier to conflate the raw thinking and the language they associate with it (which we know happens after the fact)... because they only have one language to work with. A bilingual on the other hand will understand the concept instantly if they were to think about something as themselves in one language and the same thing as themselves in another language... and they don't have to rely on poorly designed studies to know these things. Also, depending on how integrated the different language personalities are (probably depends on whether they learnt the language as a child or as an adult), they should also easily be able to see that they are not one personality but at least two personalities embodied in one being (which can then be taken further into understanding that what we think of our "self" is made up of many different personalities based on different contexts... which is all acquired from upbringing).
- dlkf 4y agoAn observational study with controls chosen at the whim of the PI is not the same as an RCT. Presumably you could implement different controls and observe the opposite conclusion. What scientists end up doing will be driven by the incentive to publish something novel, rather than a genuine search for truth.
- vintermann 4y agoHighlights more the absurdity of "general cognitive advantages" than anything else. In situations where you need a language, whether you're able to speak it or not trumps everything else. I can't perform even the simplest of tasks if the instructions are given in Chinese and I can't access a translation.
- sgt 4y agoProbably a rubbish study. You can probably do the same with programming languages and show that knowing Lisp, Java and C won't give you any cognitive advantages. Just stick to Java and you'll have plenty of "cognition". We'll all know this is (as decaffjoe pointed out) completely missing the forest for the trees.
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- kriro 4y agoFirst of all, as someone form a completely different field I like the style of the paper. Abstract and motivation are very consise and to the point with good references and it's very clear to me what they want to show and why. The method seems ok to me as well, internet based test taking with tests that sound reasonable to me (as a lay person, I have not idea what the typical tests in these studies look like). Statistics and control make sense to me. Overall, it's an interesting study. There were a couple of things I found interesting: 1) "the matched samples were constructed from individuals only in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia" which was due to the fact they didn't want to bias against people not understanding the instructions well (which were in Englisch). I'd be curious if it would be possible to find a large enough sample to reproduce the test with another base language for the instructions. Maybe French or German, Swiss citizen, parts of Italy (Südtirol), Luxembourg come to mind as natural bi- or multilinguals. 2) Going back to #1, I'm not entirely sure what criterion they used for bilingual (my understanding is just self identified by participant) but given that they used 18+ age due to ethical considerations this could be problematic. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually did it that way but I'd have prefered if they selected only people who learned the language from the parents because there's many people who speak Englisch as a second language but learned it in school/later in life but before 18. It might be interesting to redo the study with children before they are exposed to languages in school, maybe age <=10 or try to correct for this by removing the most likely "school language" Englisch. At least I suppose it's possible that there is a difference between growing up with a language and "learning" it more actively. 3) They removed outliers. However, it may be the case that bilinguals are more likely to be outliers ("gifted") than monolinguals. I don't know but I'd like to see just the outliers (140+32 if you use both 4+6 standard deviations). 4) Maybe someone with expertise in the area of neuroplasticity can chime in but the baseline takeaway from the paper is "there's no cognitive advantage to being bilingual". However, my layperson's understanding is that learning a language later in life will "reshape the brain" and possibly even use unused parts and so on which would indicate that there has to be some benefit vs. "just doing nothing". It would be interesting to know if learning a language is more beneficial vs. say taking up pottery. Alas this seems almost impossible to analyze in a meaningful way.
- oblio 4y ago
- _xnmw 4y agoThere are different types of bilingualism. Making an active effort to learn a second language for no reason other than cultural interest is a totally different activity from being forced to learn the dominant language as a disadvantaged minority in a non-native land. The former is associated with genius, the latter is actually a crutch.
- hzay 4y agoOnly in US there's this strange obsession with counting how many languages one knows. If I count, everyone in my family is at least bilingual, and most are >= trilingual. It's not unusual for someone to speak 4 languages (2 regional languages, nationally common language, english). If you really want to look into effects on cognition, it's better to count language families rather than individual languages. Two dravidian languages might be so similar (one to one mapping of linguistic concepts) that cognitively it might not change anything. In india, the poorest people often speak the most number of languages and their cognition is affected by a number of other factors related to poverty. I'm not sure how one can properly control for such factors.
- vogon_laureate 4y agoAs a bilingual person beginning to experience symptoms of cognitive decline as I age, I can confirm anecdotally that I am now dumber in two languages.
- ur-whale 4y ago>Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages Oh, this goes so, so, so much against both intuition and actual, lived experience with the topic. But then again, it's social "science" so why even pay attention when even something like "cognitive advantages" is an ill-defined, murky concept.
- dghughes 4y agoI see two different situations for bilingualism. One is to be raised from birth speaking two languages or as an adult learn a new language. I'd say the situation as an adult requires much more effort. The learning should help brain neuroplasticity or cause neuroplasticity? However it works.
- ulizzle 4y agoA counterfactual is that higher IQ correlates with reading ability and language use. Those people are far more likely to know more than one language (because it's easier) and gain access to the deeper, more expansive pool of opportunities that comes with bilingualism.
- netbioserror 4y agoI'm from a Hispanic family which is by and large bilingual and uses quite a lot of Spanglish at family events. However, I was raised monolingual, with English. My parents say they sometimes regret not teaching me Spanish. But, on they other hand, they recognize that my English rhetorical skills are significantly better than they might otherwise have been. Given that English is a language with a wide vocabulary and quite expressive specificity, this confers all sorts of advantages to me, especially in technical applications. I am most definitely a programming polyglot, however, and that was of my own doing. Learning many programming languages has most definitely had a profound effect on how I think about problems and break down sub-problems. I don't think it's made me smarter or more intelligent generally, but it has opened doors to solutions I would not have been able to consider otherwise, which is probably a good analogy for what this study is suggesting. I have definitely settled in a nice generally-optimal zone of functional-procedural: Isolate state to referentially transparent procedures, and mutate all the state you want within those procedures, but the overall program structure should be a functional pyramid of value-returning calls.
- Slapshot_gd 4y agoFor those experts in the field, curious how this study relates to this one : https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-17952-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-17952-001 , I'm absolutely no expert in any of this, but I am bilingual and did encourage my kids to explore and learn new language(s).
- amai 4y ago„The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.“ — Ludwig Wittgenstein Being bilingual increases the limits of your world. And by that you increase the amount of training data for your neural network which will e.g. avoiding overfitting to specific topics.
- blargke23 4y agoTANSTAAFL. Any advantage is offset by a disadvantage.
- poulsbohemian 4y agoDoes it boost my general cognitive advantages? Maybe not, but it sure changed my weltanschauugen.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoI have long been suspicious when people tell me that learning multiple languages is "good for brain development". Primarily because, through most of human history, I believe the only situation where you would learn multiple (really exactly 2) languages is when your tribe was conquered.