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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
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Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#22Link to PDF: https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf
Thanks. That was an interesting read.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#23A 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.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#24A study looking at the wrong variables, again...
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#25I 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)
You say it like it's a bad thing. This is an awesome way to provide both an extra language when kids don't have much else to do and fit it easy to pick them up, _and_ it saves on costs? What could be better?
Yeah, kinda weird to point it out as if there is some conflict of incentives between costs and benefits. It's a pretty darn good language to pick even if you just wanted your child to learn another language regardless of costs.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#26That 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…
If '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.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#27That 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…
I have to imagine there are parallel benefits as well. Just as a Java developer will become a better Java developer by learning programming languages with other paradigms, I have to believe knowing multiple spoken languages has tangible benefits outside of understanding the language itself.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#28This 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.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#29Welp that confirms it. I'll never learn another language.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#30This 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.