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Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
271–280 of 435 posts
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#272This seems mainly interesting for people from English-speaking countries, since everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.
Everyone? I’m the only one in my large American family (all the way through to second cousins, etc) or friend groups (excluding foreign born) who has any competency in any foreign language - and not even to fluency. Monolingual is the norm in the US with the exception of Spanish speaking immigrants.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#273Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment. Since my family lives abroad, I would like to teach my kids english at home and only use it in private settings, but feels weird having to hide something like that (also, half kids are sort of "expected" to speak english anyway).
> Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment.
This sounds more like the Japanese being... Japanese. And not in the good sense of the word.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#274I 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…
Just a counter example: I live in a multi-lingual area with a big ex-pat population and see english speakers who became multi-lingual with reduced ability to distinguish homophones.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#275This seems mainly interesting for people from English-speaking countries, since everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.
Everyone? I’m the only one in my large American family (all the way through to second cousins, etc) or friend groups (excluding foreign born) who has any competency in any foreign language - and not even to fluency. Monolingual is the norm in the US with the exception of Spanish speaking immigrants.
Re-read their comment.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#276As 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 f…
Hear hear! Exactly my point. Can knowing a second language be a benefit. Well if you like Spanish movies, then being fluent in Spanish will certainly increase you enjoyment. Nobody denies that.
Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.
It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.
(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The scientific method seems to me language-based. How to come up with hypotheses, however, seems to me exactly as you mention. They just pop out of nowhere, like a sudden inspiration that has been processing in the background and now just clicks.
I am not sure what you mean by the scientific method. The scientific method can be as simple as trial-and-error or observation, such as the idea that maybe you shouldn't eat a certain berry if you just watched someone eat one right before they passed out and started foaming at the mouth. Animals without highly developed language do this all the time.
There is no doubt that writing out or sounding out your reasoning can boost your ability to think and communicate. For example, it can promote a dialectic which can refine your ideas, and you can even have an inner dialogue using language. It can also help you form a representation of the thought process for communication.
But it can also muddle your thinking or leave you with blind spots if the language is not expressive enough or you rely on it too much. You do not need a linguistic representation of a concept in order to reason about it (well, I don't seem to and I doubt I'm special in that regard).
Just because an internally consistent language may be sufficient for basic reasoning doesn't mean it's necessary overall, or that it doesn't place a 'ceiling' on the types of thoughts you can think. I would argue that it cuts both ways.
It is definitely interesting that you seemingly get reasoning "for free" when you only optimize for language (e.g. large language models). But that is the way it would be if grammar was a more formal descendant of logic.
Maybe this is why authentic geniuses, or people capable of coming up with ideas not commonly in circulation, often have a hard time explaining their ideas (see https://kottke.org/13/05/the-three-types-of-specialist)
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may well have a point. But: I know several people with a degree in linguistics and while it may help them to have a better idea of the structure and deeper understanding of languages in general it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages. They tend to get hung up at the details of grammar and the finer points of sentence structure whereas what matters is to keep…
>it doesn't seem to help them at all in day to day communications with people in other languages. Humanities sorts are terrible at communicating with those who are not humanities sorts, just as most doctors and lawyers are terrible at communicating their specialties to the laymen. I am not talking about studying linguistics to the ends of getting a degree in it but in a more pragmatic sense, if you want to learn a bu…
So, that may not be what you are talking about when you 'talk about studying linguistics' but - and this is in a way very funny because it is exactly the point of this whole discussion and yet we seem to have a misunderstanding right there - it is what other people will interpret when they say that you should 'study linguistics'. Maybe not to the point where you'd get a degree in it but even as an extra field during your high school studies.
And in my experience your CS degree example simply fails: CS does not prepare you at all for dealing with the various programming languages and their implementations of various concepts. The parts of CS that would apply to that bit you can pick up in a few weeks by reading some books and even then you're going to be dealing with implementation details most of the time by the time you want to apply that knowledge.
If you understand variables, assignment, control structures (if, for, while, pattern matching etc) and abstraction mechanisms (subroutines, functions) then you've got the bulk of it. But it isn't going to help you more than a little bit in tackling a mid sized Java, Rails or C++ project.
If you were going to design a new programming language or write a compiler for an existing one then it may well help, and also if you are going to be working on novel data structures or to try to improve what's already there.
Being a linguist or studying linguistics may well help me to read works in dead languages or maybe to analyze other people's writings. Because that's the kind of stuff that I see the linguists around me do that seems to actually use their skills.
If there would be a single bit of advice that I could give to someone that intends to study multiple languages then it would probably be: take a year or two of Latin. Even though it is a dead language that little bit of foundation will help you gain a much easier entrance into other languages all over Europe (if those are the languages you intend to learn).
If you are going to study in language areas outside of that region, say Asia then I have no idea what would help other than to move there an immerse yourself for a couple of years.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it also helps wonders in acquiring a third language, which can be very useful in its own right. When all you know is the language you were raised with adding another is hard work, once you have that second one the next one is so much easier. But I readily believe that knowing another language isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography. It wouldn't make much sense, if anything I would…
> isn't suddenly going to make you better at math or physics or geography There are other forms of intelligence. Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those. Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
> There are other forms of intelligence.
It obviously wasn't meant as an exhaustive list.
> Plus, I'm not so sure you are right about those.
I've yet to have my other languages besides English help me with studying of other concepts unless they were strictly locally focused. Even my French didn't help in Canada where it is more used as a means of exclusivity than one of inclusivity and communications.
> Finally, it might be useful to read what people have written in other languages about those topics.
It might be. But the vast amount of information in English is such that you'll never exhaust it. I read about France in French and about Germany in German mostly because I can, not necessarily because I have to, the same subjects (in the news) are usually also available in English. And as for texts that are only available in say Chinese, French or German: I am aware that I will have to forego anything only available in Chinese because the expected pay-off from learning Chinese at my age is so low that I will spend my time in some other way. But if I were much younger I might give it a go.
But I doubt if it would make me any more intelligent.
Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study
#280I think the real question is: does this battery of 12 tests of executive function really measure intelligence? If so, why don't we use these when hiring engineers, CEOs, or any other valuable asset? I'm pessimistic that these tests measure intelligence in a meaningful way.
Because IQ testing is de facto illegal. Companies would much rather use them instead of proxies with varying degrees of accuracy.