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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

#131

Post by pazimzadeh »

lisper wrote: post #118
seizethecheese wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the commenters here are focusing on acquired languages, but does the study? I don’t think so, since the bilingual cohort was 2x as likely to be low socioeconomic status.

Good point. I guess I assumed that the second language was acquired later in life because otherwise it's not really "acquiring a second language", it's "acquiring multiple languages at the same time." In looking back over this, I stumbled over this study which seems to directly contradict the one in the original link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612443836 "This study explores whether the cognitive…

This is a fun one:

Bilinguals are better than monolinguals in detecting manipulative discourse

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#132

Post by cmcconomy »

dron57 wrote: post #54
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…

I'm not a neuroscientist, but as I understand it losing a particular ability is usually a sign of brain damage. It is likely that she learned English as an adult (or older than a toddler at least) and it was being stored in a more specific and more constrained area of the brain.

i think the point here was that it might be useful to have language redundancy so that brain damage which robs you of one language may leave you with some of your backups

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#133

Post by nunuvit »

Kamq wrote: post #101
RajT88 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out. I almost never find myself accidentally…

> I almost never find myself accidentally sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. Which is perfectly valid english.

I don't understand this comment.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#134

Post by yosito »

I feel that this study is making a very general conclusion based on very specific criteria. While I agree that knowing multiple languages often increases cognitive overhead, and probably doesn't make me superhuman smart or anything, it's a choice that does have real consequences on my abilities. Depending on the context I find myself in, it may be more useful or not. If I'm traveling around Europe, being conversational in five European languages is extremely beneficial. If I'm taking an IQ test in a lab in Iowa, knowing five European languages probably won't give me any benefit and might actually make me slower to recall the relevant things for the test.

We get good at the skills we practice, and there is absolutely a benefit from practicing the skills that are relevant to our lives.

Personally, one of the main benefits I get from knowing multiple languages is that it helps me to reason about abstract meaning and understand how to communicate clearly across cultural and linguistic lines. That's a very useful skill for developing apps that are used internationally and for living a lifestyle where I'm constantly context-switching into different cultures.

I'm a native English speaker, and one thing I've noticed is that people who only speak English are often the worst communicators because they don't realize how ambiguous their language is, how much slang they're using, and how difficult they are to understand for someone who grew up in a different context. Is it a cognitive advantage to be able to communicate better with a diverse group of people? I don't know. Not according to this study.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#135

Post by arcticbull »

koyote wrote: post #100
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…

As someone who also speaks four languages, I agree with most of your post but here are some more advantages I can think of: * Access to more media I regularly consume newspapers, subreddits and similar in other languages to get different points of view on things. Then there's literature and films (especially the ones that don't have translations) * Ease of travel (this is highly dependent on the languages you know) *…

I speak three and echo the above. English gets you most of the way in most places, but you can form stronger connections if you can meet others on their home turf instead of making them come to yours.

Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#136

Post by rjzzleep »

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 find this discussion absurd. Here's a paper that most people have not read and then add their own subjective anecdote to it to confirm their personal opinion.

Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):

“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]

What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?

What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.

[1] https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-ab...

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#138

Post by RajT88 »

Cerium wrote: post #86
RajT88 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! This has been my experience as well. My native language is English, and I do just fine in it. But I've also studied a couple other languages, and when I try to put together sentences, whatever word is closest sometimes pops out. I almost never find myself accidentally…

My experience is similar, the third language is indeed a problem. When learning the first foreign language in my mind it was "native vs other". Then when adding the third any gaps in my vocabulary would be filled by the previous language in a sort of layered cache approach. Unfortunately it is hardly ever useful to find the right Spanish word when you want a Japanese one.

"Pan" is about it.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#139

Post by wheels »

yosito wrote: post #128
fnord77 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an extra language I learned spanish at a young age and I find it pretty useless. The last time I used it in the past 20 years was watching Casa De Papiel Really wished I learned something like German or Chinese instead

Globally speaking, German is useless, unless you're European and trying to find a job in Germany because it pays better than your home country. The only German speaking country is full of educated people who also speak fluent English. You'll never meet an internationally minded German who doesn't speak excellent English. Spanish, however, is spoken in an entire continent, which also has a very low level of English, p…

I agree that German isn't especially useful globally, but you're wrong on a couple points:

- There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages.

- All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them.

(I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)

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