361–370 of 435 posts
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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.
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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
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…
What benchmark could you possibly have for this? You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like.
Being able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether. This is easy to deduce with reasoning and I can confirm it (to myself) from experience. What psychological "science" has to say about it makes me question their study than anything. It is important to remember however that not all bilinguals are equal. The languages have to be different enough. English, German and Swedish (…
Aside from that, don't underestimate the amount of thinking we do without language. What do we call that - raw braincode? So in that sense, we're all bilingual, even those only speaking English. I.e. you can think "I'm going down to the post office to post a letter with a stamp on it" without language.
Also, depending on how integrated the different language personalities are (probably depends on whether they learnt the language as a child or as an adult), they should also easily be able to see that they are not one personality but at least two personalities embodied in one being (which can then be taken further into understanding that what we think of our "self" is made up of many different personalities based on different contexts... which is all acquired from upbringing).
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.
I am most definitely a programming polyglot, however, and that was of my own doing. Learning many programming languages has most definitely had a profound effect on how I think about problems and break down sub-problems. I don't think it's made me smarter or more intelligent generally, but it has opened doors to solutions I would not have been able to consider otherwise, which is probably a good analogy for what this study is suggesting.
I have definitely settled in a nice generally-optimal zone of functional-procedural: Isolate state to referentially transparent procedures, and mutate all the state you want within those procedures, but the overall program structure should be a functional pyramid of value-returning calls.
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I suspect they meant Chomsky.
I thought so as well, but a quick web search suggests that Noam Chomsky speaks English and Hebrew. (It's a shame that Noam Chomsky is the most famous linguist, because he's so far from the best or most relevant one.) See also eg https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/8ght5y/what_langua...
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> 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. The study is about "bilingualism", not about "learning". Bilingualism is a passive property, e.g. children born to parents speaking different languages will acquire those languages, but in adulthood no longer be in the proces…
My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire a…
Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"
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> HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think, I like HN as much as the next critter but HN is an extremely small and biased sample of the US. The demographic is skewed towards young and liberal (even socialist at times) when the actual country is more like 50/50 liberal/conservative, to oversimplify a bit. On HN, you are also seeing comments from people who have both strong opinions and the free…
No worries. I am very aware that HN is heavily biased (actually, most places where discussion happens are biased). Also of course HN is not my only exposure to american culture (would be kinda absurd if it was though lol). But your comment actually illustrates very well what I mean. I know it's normal for americans to call HN "socialist" and in my culture almost nobody would use that word to describe HN. Or another e…
You get a wide range of responses if you search for comments of HN posters trying to estimate the politics of HN posters.