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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

journals.sagepub.com

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Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#371

Post by lupire »

AdamN wrote: post #270
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 understan…

That's not totally true - in Berlin there are lots of English speakers (many/most English as a second language) and so people including myself live here with pretty basic German (A2 probably). Those people are certainly learning alot about a different culture from wherever they came from even if they aren't speaking the dominant language. Obviously if I had B2 German it would be awesome and I would chat up more peopl…

English is extremely special as the modern Language Franca of the western world.

Most nations have an accessible hybrid native+English culture.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#372

Post by carlosjobim »

eru wrote: post #17
jvanderbot wrote: post #9

I 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?

> What could be better?

Paying better salaries to working people.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#373

Post by klodolph »

courgette wrote: post #78
torstenvl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Le truc c'est qu' «une phrase» en français veut dire "a sentence" en anglais.

Oui, but I also forgot that “phrase” exists in English. I grew to like English this way: massive corpus made of anglo-saxon plus French.

“Anglo-Saxon” is a bit of a broad term… you might describe Modern English as Mercian (an Anglian dialect), with lots of Saxon, Old Norse, and Old Norman influences. As well as other influences; I think those are the big ones.

Just to give an example of why “Anglo-Saxon” might be too broad a term—surviving Old English texts like Beowulf are in what you might call Late West Saxon, and the differences between Saxon and Anglian dialects help explain why Chaucer, who spoke something you might call Anglo-Norman, is much more accessible to modern readers.

If you want more of that Saxon influence, listen to West Country English, where it survives today.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#374

Post by e12e »

tgv wrote: post #359
e12e wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages. I didn't mean five or more "European dialects" I meant five or more different languages. Besides, between French and English there should be some overlap with Dutch - though I agree Dutch seems wierd on the surface:) Sticking to your broken new language in the face of "helpful English" is hard - at least with friends and co-workers you can make an agreement (all Du…

So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects, while elsewhere we have someone who considers Brazilian Portugese and Portugese Portugese two languages. I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (and by knowing, I don't mean travelguide fluency). Such people are rare.

> So here we've got someone who considers Romanian and Dutch dialects

No, but Dutch, English and French are pretty close (hence the reference to Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy").

> I doubt you know anyone who knows five languages in your definition (...) Such people are rare.

They certainly are! I didn't mean to say i know a lot of people that fit the definition - only that I have heard such people mention that it gets easier after the fifth.

I only know Norwegian/Swedish/Danish (close enough to count as one, one and a half), English, Japanese and some French (and marginal German, Spanish, Italian etc due to limited exposure and the intersection of Norwegian/English/French).

I would have to add something a little different, like Sami, Maori, Russian or possibly Farsi, Arabic to fit in the five languages boat.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#375

Post by d1sxeyes »

david-gpu wrote: post #315
KptMarchewa wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it weird that no one even spoke of understanding linguistic determinism and how using one or the other language influences how you think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism As someone who learned English as a second language, I very much experienced this.

I suspect this is overblown. Clearly a Spaniard and a Swedish don't automatically start thinking like an Australian just because they are communicating in English. What is more likely to happen is that when a Spaniard and a Swedish learn English they will over time be exposed to the culture of other English speakers. This will for the time being be dominated by American culture, but as English continues to be the lin…

I agree the effect is probably minimal but it is not likely to be zero.

The jury is still out, but there is certainly evidence that a person’s spoken language influences at least memory.

I don’t remember the details but there have been studies of speakers of languages where there are more names for colours (e.g. Russian with blue, Hungarian with red) are more accurately able to recall a colour that they have seen previously than a speaker of a language without such a distinction (e.g. English).

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#376

Post by lostmsu »

p1esk wrote: post #330
lostmsu wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you translate parachute to Russian?

“Parachute” is identical in Russian, because in both languages it came from French.

It was a trick question. Parent said you can translate anything to Russian. That's a rather uninteresting statement in practice given the parachute example. And there are entire kinds of such examples different in nature.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#378

Post by 908B64B197 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #303
brabel wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. What makes you think French has a less "agricultural" root than Romanian. Both languages have existed since a time when industrialization was still far in the future... are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation?? This sounds kind of ridiculous to…

> are you suggesting French somehow evolved from a more academic foundation? I think it's true. Modern French is derived from a form of French spoken among aristocrats; the Norman Conquest didn't bring to Britain a great influx of peasant French. For a long time, an educated Briton (a) spoke French, and (b) had lived in France, and even been educated there.

> peasant French

It's also that until the 19th century and compulsory education there were multiple dialects of French spoken throughout the country. "Royal French" is a descendant of Norman and was the language the bourgeoisie adopted after the revolution and that the rest of the country standardized on.

Same thing happened in the Americans French colonies in Canada and Louisiana; the settlers brought the "Royal" French with them because they were majorly from the north.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#379

Post by lisper »

schwartzworld wrote: post #363
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 feel as if this has expanded my ability What benchmark could you possibly have for this? You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like.

That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me.

Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult.

(In fact, I don't even have to imagine. I know what it is like to learn a language as an adult, and how different that is from learning one as a child, because I've done both.)

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#380

Post by amai »

„The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.“ — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Being bilingual increases the limits of your world. And by that you increase the amount of training data for your neural network which will e.g. avoiding overfitting to specific topics.

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