16 ms·

This 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/disad

This 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 3y ago
That 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  I think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.
  - andrekandre 3y ago
    not 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.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative economic importance of various languages and not some inherent property of multilingualism.
      - oblio 3y ago
        Yeah. That's why the argument about number of speakers is total bunk,for example. It's all about the economic weight of those speakers and the desirability of living in the countries where the language is widely used. There's a reason English is so far ahead of Mandarin or Hindi.
      - achenet 3y ago
        for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Yeah that's completely reasonable, but there are a lot of people trying to sell you on career success that is a mirage. And it can be frustrating the people you want to talk with often speak English better than you speak the language you're learning, though that's more of a problem with some languages than others.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  I think it may debunk the myth about ability to fix all false friends that some americans seemingly believe in.
  - SamBam 3y ago
    Unsure what myth your referring to. The only thing I know about "false friends" in the context of learning languages are "false friend" words that sound similar but don't have similar meanings, like "embarrassed" in English and "embarazada" in Spanish (which means pregnant).
- dlkf 3y ago
  > 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? Yes
  - edanm 3y ago
    Do you have a reason to back that up? I'm far less sure. (I mean, I think the advantage is that you are able to speak to more people easily and in their native tongue, which is a whole other advantage, but that's different than "expanding your mind" directly by learning another language.)
  - joenot443 3y ago
    >Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I went to high school in Ontario with anglophones who took French immersion, learned fluent conversational French, graduated high school legally credentialed a bilingual, but then proceeded to move to Toronto and never really leave the province. I don't like being judgmental about people's worldly experiences, but I don't think that those high school French classes really did much to colour their worldview, most of us just knew it as a reliable way to secure a 90+ average.
routerl 3y ago
> ...you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people And of American culture and its people. You might re-evaluate some ideas you'd grown up with, becoming a more cosmopolitan/adaptable/understanding person, capable of having deeper relationships with a larger proportion of the Earth's population. But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  I don't think you really have to learn the destination country's language for that. At least it is unclear that the lack of language would be any kind of major roadblock.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity How do you test «cognitive capacity»? The other day on these pages a newcomer came and wrote he "distrusts them <category>". Some call ignorance relevant to "cognitive capacity". (Some call it "much more than just relevant".)
  - isaacfrond 3y ago
    It's in the paper. You present a battery of tasks, and see how well you do. In this case, twelve cognitive tests were included: Double Trouble Spatial Planning Odd One Out Grammatical Reasoning Feature Match Polygons Digit Span Rotations Token Search Paired Associates Spatial Span Monkey Ladder
    - VLM 3y ago
      > It's in the paper. Most of us don't have access to the paper, although our tax dollars surely paid for it.
      - InfamousRece 3y ago
        Most of us use scihub to retrieve papers.
koreth1 3y ago
Globally, a very small percentage of bilingual people fit the "I decided to learn a different language and then used it to temporarily live in another country very different from my own" model. Much more common is, "I speak my local regional language and also the official national language, and so does everyone else in my community."
- MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  True but many people also use that ability to travel to the local large city.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Thank happiness that we have the World Wide Web (literally suggestive) and global publishing trade then, if some people do not move much physically. Multilingualism is an enabler.
- gehatare 3y ago
  Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  "They forced us to learn it in school" is another one. E.g. what I heard about Lebanon: And by forced, I mean you don't just do a French lesson, you learn other non-language lessons in other languages.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Yeah, "Cognitive Advantages" is such a poor proxy for measuring a more enriched world view / life. Let's say I live in a country of 3-4 million native language speakers, with next to zero speakers of my language internationally. Teaching a kid English at an early age opens them up to experiencing so much more than whatever happens to get produced / translated into my native lounge. When it comes to consuming information, would you rather your child was a great white shark or a bottom feeder? Knowledge is a ladder, whose benefits compound over time, the end result is expertise. Also, understanding people from different nations is a good defence against parochialism, thinking that your people have al the answers.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> This 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. But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't. That's different from how enriched you will be as a person from learning about other people and culture - It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.
- paganel 3y ago
  > It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself. I've never set foot in the US and yet I know lots of things about the country and its people because I can speak and write in English, certainly I do know more about the US compared to my fellow countrymen who cannot speak and write English. The same goes for French, even though I've been to France two or three times, I know a lot more about the country, its history, its moeurs as a result of me reading books directly in French (many of them never got translated, not even into English).
  - thevagrant 3y ago
    I see your point, although do you think that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage? Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory and your existing cognitive advantage has helped you to become bilingual?
    - soco 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure everybody can do it wherever the average is. It's a matter of wanting to do it, that's all. Foreign workers come and pick up whatever host country language yet they're not always the brightest and also don't have exactly ideal conditions to do it. Like a sibling comment touched, you can go to Berlin and complain the language is difficult, talk English with Berliners happy to practice their English, and you'll come back learning almost nothing while they'll polish their English without even needing to travel outside Berlin. Because of choices. Learning something new is a challenge and like with every challenge, can be accepted or not.
bedatadriven 3y ago
It's an academic paper with an intentionally narrow focus. > If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the _broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains_ that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals.
TbobbyZ 3y ago
There are advantages at the individual level to understand and communicate with multiple cultures. I would argue it’s more than an increase/decrease in IQ points. Did the individual increase in their free time and income is the only valid output worth measuring in bilingual advantages.
Levitz 3y ago
It's still an important piece of information, first because it disagrees with what we previously thought, second because there are fringe cases in which learning a language doesn't open you to anything else. I'm Spanish and live in the Basque Country. Everybody speaks Spanish here, but we are supposed to also speak Basque. The idea that it's advantageous to learning and such is one of the main arguments used to justify a push to learn the language. Basque language was the subject I invested the most time in through my whole compulsory education, so frankly, I do care.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Learning a second language as an adult or adolescent makes it vastly easier to learn additional languages later. So your time learning Basque was not wasted.
- hungryforcodes 3y ago
  Have started with English then learned Spanish (travelling through Latin America extensively), and now an Asian language, I have acquired all sorts of advantages and also new ways of thinking. I really feel people on HN ARE sometimes missing the forest for the trees and I can't imagine how learning a new language could not be a good thing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m000 3y ago
I think you've missed the topic entirely. From the abstract: "There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children." This seems to be aimed at debunking the urban (expat?) legend that raising your children to be billingual will somehow make them smarter. In the end, this perception may end-up being just the adults' attempt to soothe their feelings of guilt for the inconveniences their children have to go through because of their international career.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
I find it weird that no one even spoke of understanding linguistic determinism and how using one or the other language influences how you think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism As someone who learned English as a second language, I very much experienced this.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  I suspect this is overblown. Clearly a Spaniard and a Swedish don't automatically start thinking like an Australian just because they are communicating in English. What is more likely to happen is that when a Spaniard and a Swedish learn English they will over time be exposed to the culture of other English speakers. This will for the time being be dominated by American culture, but as English continues to be the lingua franca of the world, the balance will slowly shift and include more cultural elements from places with large populations like India. Language barriers prevent the sharing of culture and being able to communicate with a wide array of people is something to celebrate.
  - d1sxeyes 3y ago
    I agree the effect is probably minimal but it is not likely to be zero. The jury is still out, but there is certainly evidence that a person’s spoken language influences at least memory. I don’t remember the details but there have been studies of speakers of languages where there are more names for colours (e.g. Russian with blue, Hungarian with red) are more accurately able to recall a colour that they have seen previously than a speaker of a language without such a distinction (e.g. English).
- tgv 3y ago
  That is because it is considered wrong. There is no solid evidence, despite whole labs trying for decades. There are only very weak effects, and given the state of research in psychology, I'd be surprised to find one that has been consistently reproduced. The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.
e12e 3y ago
> 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. Less obvious, and IMNHO more significant is that you'll come back with a new perspective on culture; and as a result a new perspective on your own culture (now having a point of comparison).

emodendroket 3y ago

That 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MobiusHorizons 3y ago
I think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.
- andrekandre 3y ago
  not 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.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Having achieved a foreign language college major with minors in two others I find it hard not to be cynical about this unless the doors you’re talking about are things like vacations, entertainment, and similar amusements. From a work perspective it has not done much for me. Of course that could be different if my native language weren’t English or I didn’t work in the US, but then that’s just about the relative economic importance of various languages and not some inherent property of multilingualism.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Yeah. That's why the argument about number of speakers is total bunk,for example. It's all about the economic weight of those speakers and the desirability of living in the countries where the language is widely used. There's a reason English is so far ahead of Mandarin or Hindi.
    - achenet 3y ago
      for me the rewards to learning (basic) German have been more personal than professional - attempting to speak with a German speaker in their native language generally makes it easier to bond with them.
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        Yeah that's completely reasonable, but there are a lot of people trying to sell you on career success that is a mirage. And it can be frustrating the people you want to talk with often speak English better than you speak the language you're learning, though that's more of a problem with some languages than others.
GoblinSlayer 3y ago
I think it may debunk the myth about ability to fix all false friends that some americans seemingly believe in.
- SamBam 3y ago
  Unsure what myth your referring to. The only thing I know about "false friends" in the context of learning languages are "false friend" words that sound similar but don't have similar meanings, like "embarrassed" in English and "embarazada" in Spanish (which means pregnant).
dlkf 3y ago
> 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? Yes
- edanm 3y ago
  Do you have a reason to back that up? I'm far less sure. (I mean, I think the advantage is that you are able to speak to more people easily and in their native tongue, which is a whole other advantage, but that's different than "expanding your mind" directly by learning another language.)
- joenot443 3y ago
  >Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I went to high school in Ontario with anglophones who took French immersion, learned fluent conversational French, graduated high school legally credentialed a bilingual, but then proceeded to move to Toronto and never really leave the province. I don't like being judgmental about people's worldly experiences, but I don't think that those high school French classes really did much to colour their worldview, most of us just knew it as a reliable way to secure a 90+ average.

routerl 3y ago

> ...you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people And of American culture and its people. You might re-evaluate some ideas you'd grown up with, becoming a more cosmopolitan/adaptable/understanding person, capable of having deeper relationships with a larger proportion of the Earth's population. But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity.

lostmsu 3y ago
I don't think you really have to learn the destination country's language for that. At least it is unclear that the lack of language would be any kind of major roadblock.
mdp2021 3y ago
> But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity How do you test «cognitive capacity»? The other day on these pages a newcomer came and wrote he "distrusts them <category>". Some call ignorance relevant to "cognitive capacity". (Some call it "much more than just relevant".)
- isaacfrond 3y ago
  It's in the paper. You present a battery of tasks, and see how well you do. In this case, twelve cognitive tests were included: Double Trouble Spatial Planning Odd One Out Grammatical Reasoning Feature Match Polygons Digit Span Rotations Token Search Paired Associates Spatial Span Monkey Ladder
  - VLM 3y ago
    > It's in the paper. Most of us don't have access to the paper, although our tax dollars surely paid for it.
    - InfamousRece 3y ago
      Most of us use scihub to retrieve papers.

koreth1 3y ago

Globally, a very small percentage of bilingual people fit the "I decided to learn a different language and then used it to temporarily live in another country very different from my own" model. Much more common is, "I speak my local regional language and also the official national language, and so does everyone else in my community."

MobiusHorizons 3y ago
True but many people also use that ability to travel to the local large city.
mdp2021 3y ago
Thank happiness that we have the World Wide Web (literally suggestive) and global publishing trade then, if some people do not move much physically. Multilingualism is an enabler.
gehatare 3y ago
Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.
quickthrower2 3y ago
"They forced us to learn it in school" is another one. E.g. what I heard about Lebanon: And by forced, I mean you don't just do a French lesson, you learn other non-language lessons in other languages.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

Yeah, "Cognitive Advantages" is such a poor proxy for measuring a more enriched world view / life. Let's say I live in a country of 3-4 million native language speakers, with next to zero speakers of my language internationally. Teaching a kid English at an early age opens them up to experiencing so much more than whatever happens to get produced / translated into my native lounge. When it comes to consuming information, would you rather your child was a great white shark or a bottom feeder? Knowledge is a ladder, whose benefits compound over time, the end result is expertise. Also, understanding people from different nations is a good defence against parochialism, thinking that your people have al the answers.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> This 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. But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't. That's different from how enriched you will be as a person from learning about other people and culture - It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself.

paganel 3y ago
> It's the moving to China for a year that would increase your understanding of Chinese culture and people far more than learning Chinese by itself. I've never set foot in the US and yet I know lots of things about the country and its people because I can speak and write in English, certainly I do know more about the US compared to my fellow countrymen who cannot speak and write English. The same goes for French, even though I've been to France two or three times, I know a lot more about the country, its history, its moeurs as a result of me reading books directly in French (many of them never got translated, not even into English).
- thevagrant 3y ago
  I see your point, although do you think that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage? Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory and your existing cognitive advantage has helped you to become bilingual?
  - soco 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure everybody can do it wherever the average is. It's a matter of wanting to do it, that's all. Foreign workers come and pick up whatever host country language yet they're not always the brightest and also don't have exactly ideal conditions to do it. Like a sibling comment touched, you can go to Berlin and complain the language is difficult, talk English with Berliners happy to practice their English, and you'll come back learning almost nothing while they'll polish their English without even needing to travel outside Berlin. Because of choices. Learning something new is a challenge and like with every challenge, can be accepted or not.

bedatadriven 3y ago

It's an academic paper with an intentionally narrow focus. > If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the _broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains_ that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals.

TbobbyZ 3y ago

There are advantages at the individual level to understand and communicate with multiple cultures. I would argue it’s more than an increase/decrease in IQ points. Did the individual increase in their free time and income is the only valid output worth measuring in bilingual advantages.

Levitz 3y ago

It's still an important piece of information, first because it disagrees with what we previously thought, second because there are fringe cases in which learning a language doesn't open you to anything else. I'm Spanish and live in the Basque Country. Everybody speaks Spanish here, but we are supposed to also speak Basque. The idea that it's advantageous to learning and such is one of the main arguments used to justify a push to learn the language. Basque language was the subject I invested the most time in through my whole compulsory education, so frankly, I do care.

zarzavat 3y ago
Learning a second language as an adult or adolescent makes it vastly easier to learn additional languages later. So your time learning Basque was not wasted.
hungryforcodes 3y ago
Have started with English then learned Spanish (travelling through Latin America extensively), and now an Asian language, I have acquired all sorts of advantages and also new ways of thinking. I really feel people on HN ARE sometimes missing the forest for the trees and I can't imagine how learning a new language could not be a good thing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

m000 3y ago

I think you've missed the topic entirely. From the abstract: "There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children." This seems to be aimed at debunking the urban (expat?) legend that raising your children to be billingual will somehow make them smarter. In the end, this perception may end-up being just the adults' attempt to soothe their feelings of guilt for the inconveniences their children have to go through because of their international career.

KptMarchewa 3y ago

I find it weird that no one even spoke of understanding linguistic determinism and how using one or the other language influences how you think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism As someone who learned English as a second language, I very much experienced this.

david-gpu 3y ago
I suspect this is overblown. Clearly a Spaniard and a Swedish don't automatically start thinking like an Australian just because they are communicating in English. What is more likely to happen is that when a Spaniard and a Swedish learn English they will over time be exposed to the culture of other English speakers. This will for the time being be dominated by American culture, but as English continues to be the lingua franca of the world, the balance will slowly shift and include more cultural elements from places with large populations like India. Language barriers prevent the sharing of culture and being able to communicate with a wide array of people is something to celebrate.
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  I agree the effect is probably minimal but it is not likely to be zero. The jury is still out, but there is certainly evidence that a person’s spoken language influences at least memory. I don’t remember the details but there have been studies of speakers of languages where there are more names for colours (e.g. Russian with blue, Hungarian with red) are more accurately able to recall a colour that they have seen previously than a speaker of a language without such a distinction (e.g. English).
tgv 3y ago
That is because it is considered wrong. There is no solid evidence, despite whole labs trying for decades. There are only very weak effects, and given the state of research in psychology, I'd be surprised to find one that has been consistently reproduced. The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.

e12e 3y ago

> 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. Less obvious, and IMNHO more significant is that you'll come back with a new perspective on culture; and as a result a new perspective on your own culture (now having a point of comparison).