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I foresee a lot of comments from monolingual americans and brits trying to dispute this.
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As someone who grew up in a bilingual environment, it seems intuitive to me that I'm worse for it (in terms of my social dealings and my problem-solving skills). I think if I had linguistic skills tested, I would probably be rated above-average for both English and my maternal tongue, but somehow to me it just doesn't feel that way... and I find this profoundly annoying, I feel home nowhere.
I'm not bilingual, so this is an outsider looking in, but piggybacking off the sibling comment I wonder if you feel you're worse at language because you'll often have thoughts during a conversation that your brain can express easily in one language but not the one currently being spoken? So you often feel like you're having trouble expressing yourself in any given language? One could argue that such events occur for…
I foresee a lot of comments from monolingual americans and brits trying to dispute this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_multiling... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-bilingual/20190... https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bilingual-... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-batt... https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Relationship-of-Bi... https://psyarxiv.com/gjh95/
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Am I really monolingual when I'm fluent in multiple programming languages and endless niche industry jargon? Jokes aside, I'd assume the context switching would be psychologically rather similar.
The context switching between programming languages bears no subjective similarity to human language. As someone who knows 2 human languages and 6-8 computer languages, it's just not at all similar. They don't use the same parts of your brain, for starters. You can't describe a dream in Java.
>You can't describe a dream in Java.
Before you write any code, you first imagine how the application should work. So yes, a person can codify something from their imagination into Java.
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The fact that it seems intuitive increases the risk that the study is wrong
As someone who grew up in a bilingual environment, it seems intuitive to me that I'm worse for it (in terms of my social dealings and my problem-solving skills). I think if I had linguistic skills tested, I would probably be rated above-average for both English and my maternal tongue, but somehow to me it just doesn't feel that way... and I find this profoundly annoying, I feel home nowhere.
Looking at the numbers effectively it seems that monolinguals have diminished returns - and I can see that just because a lot of problem spaces are like that.
Granted "vocabulary size" isn't quite apples to apples given how languages and syntaxes differ.
Check back in 10 years after the replication crisis has burned through this field.
It seems far-fetched to you that learning a second language has benefits for the brain?
Further, the more you think about it, the less intuitive it is. I believe that second languages, completely unstratified on other factors, is correlated with "better brains" by some metric. I do not believe that the statement that this is causal, or totally uniform. Could it not be that better brains seek out new languages? Could it be that learning a language is healthy for some part of the population and not others? For a trivial example, is learning a fifth language really worth your time? Is it possible that people who learn a new language would do absolutely nothing with that time otherwise?
As for my own thoughts, learning a new natural language is extraordinarily boring. There are no problems to solve, it's just memorization and exercise. It takes a tremendous capacity to deal with boredom to learn a new language, and the tremendous capacity to deal with boredom does not strike me as uniformly good, though it does strike me as probably being correlated with higher average intelligence.