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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

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Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#251

Post by Epokhe »

crispyambulance wrote: post #30

This 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…

Was your mother a late bilingual? From this paper [1], we know that for late bilinguals, regions for each language are spatially separated in Broca's area. Broca's area is responsible for speaking, while language understanding is attributed to Wernicke's area*. It's possible that the stroke affected only the part of the Broca's region responsible for English speaking. And since language understanding is handled by another region, it wasn't affected.

*For completeness, according to current neurolinguistic models it's more complex than that, more brain regions are actually responsible for speech/understanding.

[1] http://www.nature.com/articles/40623

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#252

Post by lIl-IIIl »

notdang wrote: post #189
wudangmonk wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really can't relate to most of your points. Words either come naturally as they do for everyone else or you don't use the word in that language therefore you will try to guess it or think of a similar one. This just means that you are not exposed to the same vocabulary in both languages. All my Comp Sci and Math vocabulary is in English because of school/online/talking to others. All my botany and plant knowledge k…

Don't know how ridiculous it is, but I live in a Spanish speaking country, using English at work, consuming English part of the internet, occasionally using Russian during the day (because of Russian "refugees") and no one around me speaks my native language. There is a cognitive load.

I would think that the cognitive load is there because you are speaking a foreign language (whether one or many). I don't think it's debatable that speaking a foreign language day in day out with no one to speak your native language can wear you out.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#253

Post by dlkf »

emodendroket wrote: post #204
decaffjoe wrote: post #201

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'…

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"…

> 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

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#254

Post by oblio »

wenc wrote: post #120
AdrenalinMd wrote: post #50

As 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 langua…

I speak 7 (4 acquired as a child, 1 in school, and 2 as an adult) and I find I'm able to understand understand cultural nuances better, which helps me to bridge cultural gaps and have multi-perspectival views on most things. (this is quite apart from the unproven Sapir-Whorf hypotheses stuff about language influencing thoughts -- it's not like that at all). Having multiple languages simply gives me affinity for multi…

You've probably invested thousand of hours in learning all of those languages. Some just by circumstance/luck (maybe something like this? mom speaking 1 language, dad speaking another, both speaking a common language, the place you were in having another secondary language), some through your own efforts.

As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#255

Post by dlkf »

An 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.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#256

Post by thejackgoode »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #129
lisper wrote: post #94

This 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 yo…

I agree with you. I once had an argument with a monolingual English-speaking person who was convinced that language is necessary for thinking, or that thinking somehow comes from language, which couldn't be further from my experience where I will have an abstract thought and then try to put it into words. However it took years for me to be conscious of the abstract thinking. I started out by thinking in my native ton…

This. I know it has very little scientific merit, but Roger Penrose's argument that "consciousness is quantum" always rang that bell to me, the thought (or a solution to a problem) comes to me always entirely at once, not one word at a time.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#257

Post by bryanrasmussen »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #219
decaffjoe wrote: post #201

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'…

> 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 increa…

>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.

sure, go to China for a year, only speak English, surround yourself with English speaking friends and going to English friendly restaurants and in the end come back with an increased understanding of Chinese culture and people and probably get jobs based on that understanding!

In short, speaking the language at least well enough to interact with the population is prerequisite for the increased understanding.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#258

Post by lIl-IIIl »

typ wrote: post #227

One 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 e…

That 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.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#259

Post by GoblinSlayer »

AdrenalinMd wrote: post #50

As 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 langua…

I would understand if it was Finnish, but really Dutch is yet another european dialect. What problem could it hypothetically ever pose to learning?

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#260

Post by zarzavat »

Levitz wrote: post #238
decaffjoe wrote: post #201

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'…

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 justi…

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.
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