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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

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Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#331

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

zirgs wrote: post #228
nayuki wrote: post #179

I 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 a…

Funny how the Chinese have to use that 26-letter alphabet too, because you can't put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

Smartphones 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

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#333

Post by IIAOPSW »

watwut wrote: post #286
IIAOPSW wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why its ridiculous. Brains are not magically above the constraints of information lookup from a database. The more you know, the more you have to sort through somehow.

That is not how it works? People who know a lot are not in general slower then people who know only a little.

Have you tested that or are you conjecturing from intuition?

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#334

Post by ur-whale »

>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.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#335

Post by ur-whale »

pdpi wrote: post #295
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But that's not what the paper studied. This is a recurring problem with science reporting. Falsifiability and reproducibility demand that good studies focus on very specific, well-defined effects. Then it gets reported as leading to much broader conclusions on the topic as a whole. Counterintuitively, "missing the forest for the trees" is exactly what you want a study like this to do. You can let a later meta-analy…

[flagged]

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#336

Post by mpsprd »

ckz wrote: post #145
mpsprd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

I'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…

My kid is barely 2yrs, so my plans for English immersion are still vague, but here goes:

- consuming all media in the original language instead of dubs

- kindergarten already does some bilingual exploration, she's a native English speaker

- Later on I intend to do an "English day" each week at home where we would only converse in English. From my personal experience, the best path to fluency is having no choice but to speak in a given language. I also want to create boundaries to prevent mixing the two languages.

About french children's book, I could send you a mail about it. Depending on the age of your kids "la courte échelle" has great stuff.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#337

Post by edanm »

dlkf wrote: post #253
emodendroket wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.)

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#338

Post by scrollaway »

oblio wrote: post #329
scrollaway wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The investment you’re talking about is likely minimal. They only acquired two as an adult. There is time being spent there but learning a language is a fun and rewarding activity, which tends to become easier the more of them you know. I speak 5 and had gotten used to being the exception; then I moved to Brussels and it’s normal here to meet people who speak even more, far more fluently than I do. I was at this board…

There are different levels of investment and different level of expectations, and I say this as someone that speaks 3 languages (Romanian, English, French) and understands a few others at a basic level (German, Italian, Spanish). Children have a very limited vocabulary and tend to make a lot of mistakes (grammar, word usage and pronunciation mistakes) and those mistakes are easily overlooked, especially by adults, si…

The CEFR is a tool to evaluate proficiency, but it's misleading if you look at it as a "ladder" with "native" at the top". Most adults aren't C2 in their own native language, despite "investing" sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours "learning" it.

This video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqj5qPF_puU] by Olly Richards sums up my feelings on the definition of fluency. Personally, I believe even as early as B2 you can call yourself a fluent speaker, because it's roughly the level where you stop struggling to express your thoughts or to understand other people's. But it also depends how you have learned. B2 can look very different depending on whether it was leared in mostly academic vs literary vs spoken contexts.

> Even purely bilingual kids that learned both languages from birth have idiosyncrasies monolingual native speakers notice, for example.

Those tend to be cultural. My native language is French, but I cannot browse /r/france without wondering wtf everyone's talking about. I'm extremely disconnected from French culture as I moved out when I was 14, so I never experienced adulthood in French and I had to learn things like what "Pôle emploi" is or some such. I'm still C2 in French,

I also do make mistakes in English, but I catch plenty of native English speakers make egregious mistakes or not know fairly basic things about their own language. Another commenter mentioned the their/they're your/you're distinction is one that natives tend to mess up more often than non-natives; anecdotally, that seems correct to me.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#339

Post by VLM »

isaacfrond wrote: post #246
mdp2021 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ". Some call ignorance relevant to "cognitive capacity". (Some call it "much more than just relevant".)

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

> It's in the paper.

Most of us don't have access to the paper, although our tax dollars surely paid for it.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#340

Post by nohaydeprobleme »

denton-scratch wrote: post #307
nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A difference might be related to idioms and slang. For example, in English, I might want to say that some commitment "isn't worth it," whereas in French, it might be more natural to say « ça ne vaut pas la peine » (literal translation: it's not worth the pain). Or I might want to say, "that's just the way things are," but the more natural French translation is « c'est la vie » (literal translation: it's the life, or…

> it's not worth the pain "Peine" isn't just pain; it's also trouble. So I think "It's not worth the trouble" is a better rendition. /me a native English speaker, who learned French by immersion aged about 6.

That difference between the literal word-by-word translation [1] and the semantic translation is my point of focus.

In English, my suggested translation would be that “It isn’t worth it.” But since this word-for-word translation would feel unnatural (that is, it’s typically better to introduce « la peine » even if the word trouble/pain wasn’t in the original sentence), there can be an extra cognitive load that interrupts fluency.

With enough conscious practice to train this, the translation of common idioms can become automatic. But meaningful translation instead of literal translation of idioms (especially of those more rarely used) can be a potential reason for someone to stop thinking in a target language, and revert to one’s native language to start thinking of the most natural translation for the phrase.

As another example, if I want to say “When pigs fly” in French, my instinct is to stop and use another phrase because the word-by-word translation is probably unnatural. In this case, my instinct is correct, as the proper meaningful translation is « Quand les poules ont les dents » (word-by-word translation: ‘When chicken have teeth’). So, dealing with idiom translation is an added mental effort to translate, which may cause thinking in one’s native language for some people.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/literal

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