71–80 of 161 posts
I understand the concerns about p-value but the causal pathway is such a clear one (make brain work harder each day and it stays elastic and effective longer) that this should be a slam dunk for more research grants
This might be me being overly cautious here, but I would be wary of the political implications of the study. It's from an open University that's a project for lifelong learning funded as a public service in Catalonia - promoting the catalan language in the region is a key point of the project, so studies finding out that bilingualism is something great to have raise red flags about the nationalist agenda behind it. T…
[0] https://www.elmundo.es/cataluna/2019/04/25/5cc192b4fdddff712...
[1] http://convivenciacivicacatalana.blogspot.com/p/administraci...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.
Have you got a source for any of that? I imagine a lot of demographic factors could confound such a study, but I don’t see why multilingual people would be richer/healthier/more educated. In a lot of western countries, I’d imagine a huge amount of the multilingual population would be made of less well off immigrants.
the working class tend to be multilingual - nurses, deliverymen, (food) hawkers, construction workers, odd-job labourers. when you think of someone who has to juggle multiple languages - mandarin, cantonese, malay, tamil, a smattering of english - often as a necessity, it's someone who's had to hustle at the lower rungs of society.
the educated class tend to be monolingual - researchers, policy makers, lawyers, bankers - they've only ever had to operate in environments where the only language used is english.
Almost everyone is bilingual in Barcelona. They teach Catalan and Spanish at school, and both are spoken by the general population. How did they get non-bilingual people there?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you got a source for any of that? I imagine a lot of demographic factors could confound such a study, but I don’t see why multilingual people would be richer/healthier/more educated. In a lot of western countries, I’d imagine a huge amount of the multilingual population would be made of less well off immigrants.
in singapore, it is the opposite. the working class tend to be multilingual - nurses, deliverymen, (food) hawkers, construction workers, odd-job labourers. when you think of someone who has to juggle multiple languages - mandarin, cantonese, malay, tamil, a smattering of english - often as a necessity, it's someone who's had to hustle at the lower rungs of society. the educated class tend to be monolingual - research…
I’m not sure it’s a sign of social status in English speaking countries. The wealthier you are, the more you can just expect everybody around you to speak English. Where I live, the most common language I’d expect somebody to know besides English is Spanish, and the local Spanish speaking population isn’t known for their excessive wealth.
The title has been editorialized unfortunately. The page uses Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment which is an important summary of the paper: everyone in the study is basically bilingual, but the bilingual composite score (how bilingual you are / how much you actively speak and switch languages) is suggested as a precursor of delayed cognitive decline. The title of the original paper…
How do we know the cognitive impairment isn't causing people to not speak two languages (despite knowing two - as in they can't remember one of them), long before other symptoms appear? The only way to test that is to split a pool of bilingual people into two groups, and forbid one group from using one language. Was that done?