Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

journals.sagepub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 435 posts

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#301

Post by denton-scratch »

isaacfrond wrote: post #276
rjzzleep wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> What benefit is there of learning Latin?

I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.

I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?

[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#302

Post by paganel »

thevagrant wrote: post #263
paganel wrote: post #239

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. I've never set foot in the US and yet I know lots of things about the country and its people because I can speak and write in English, certainly I do know more about the US compared to my fellow countrymen who cannot speak and write English. The same goes for French, eve…

I see your point, although do you think that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage? Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory and your existing cognitive advantage has helped you to become bilingual?

> that being bilingual gave you significant cognitive advantage?

Probably not in the "intelligence tests" kind of way, but, then again, as time passes I've tended to view those more and more as charlatanism.

> Or could you be quite intelligent with above average memory

I certainly used to have a much better memory when I was a kid (I'm now in my early 40s), that's when I basically put the basis for learning all the foreign languages that I now know: English (via the public education system here), French (via my dad and via school), Italian (by watching TV and because Italian is very close to Romanian), partially also Spanish by watching football matches commented in Spanish on TV.

Come to think of it, a study trying to explain how come kids and teenagers are much better at learning foreign languages compared to adults would be more interesting.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#303

Post by denton-scratch »

brabel wrote: post #234
udev wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also speak the same four languages plus one more. I do consider there are advantages to speaking several languages. I learned from English that you can be very precise, but also economical in exposition of complex matter. I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere). I always say that "you can translate anything into Russian"…

> 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.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#304

Post by jacquesm »

eru wrote: post #284
jacquesm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cool combination.

German comes from my side, the rest comes from Singapore.

Seeing young kids fluently switch between a bunch of unrelated languages never ceases to amaze me.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#305

Post by jacquesm »

eru wrote: post #293
silverpepsi wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual. Second language acquisition research is a joke, you cannot transform your learning by deep diving on it. And way too many linguists are barely capable of learning languages to fluency, it's not common for them to be polyglots. Being able to understand the hardest grammatical concepts in say Polish, Arabic, or Hungarian in a half hour doesn't imply one has any ca…

> The most famous linguist in the world is a monolingual. Who is that?

I suspect they meant Chomsky.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#306

Post by kriro »

First of all, as someone form a completely different field I like the style of the paper. Abstract and motivation are very consise and to the point with good references and it's very clear to me what they want to show and why.

The method seems ok to me as well, internet based test taking with tests that sound reasonable to me (as a lay person, I have not idea what the typical tests in these studies look like). Statistics and control make sense to me. Overall, it's an interesting study.

There were a couple of things I found interesting:

1) "the matched samples were constructed from individuals only in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia" which was due to the fact they didn't want to bias against people not understanding the instructions well (which were in Englisch). I'd be curious if it would be possible to find a large enough sample to reproduce the test with another base language for the instructions. Maybe French or German, Swiss citizen, parts of Italy (Südtirol), Luxembourg come to mind as natural bi- or multilinguals.

2) Going back to #1, I'm not entirely sure what criterion they used for bilingual (my understanding is just self identified by participant) but given that they used 18+ age due to ethical considerations this could be problematic. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually did it that way but I'd have prefered if they selected only people who learned the language from the parents because there's many people who speak Englisch as a second language but learned it in school/later in life but before 18. It might be interesting to redo the study with children before they are exposed to languages in school, maybe age 3) They removed outliers. However, it may be the case that bilinguals are more likely to be outliers ("gifted") than monolinguals. I don't know but I'd like to see just the outliers (140+32 if you use both 4+6 standard deviations).

4) Maybe someone with expertise in the area of neuroplasticity can chime in but the baseline takeaway from the paper is "there's no cognitive advantage to being bilingual". However, my layperson's understanding is that learning a language later in life will "reshape the brain" and possibly even use unused parts and so on which would indicate that there has to be some benefit vs. "just doing nothing". It would be interesting to know if learning a language is more beneficial vs. say taking up pottery. Alas this seems almost impossible to analyze in a meaningful way.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#307

Post by denton-scratch »

nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #177
hackernewds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I'll find myself doing translations in my head while speaking in English (my second language). And I find interacting socially much smoother in my native tongue. I'm not sure if that relates directly to being able to connect deeply with the society of my upbringing, or that there is some hidden neural pattern there? For what it's worth, I've now been speaking English primarily longer than my mother tongue.

A difference might be related to idioms and slang. For example, in English, I might want to say that some commitment "isn't worth it," whereas in French, it might be more natural to say « ça ne vaut pas la peine » (literal translation: it's not worth the pain). Or I might want to say, "that's just the way things are," but the more natural French translation is « c'est la vie » (literal translation: it's the life, or…

> it's not worth the pain

"Peine" isn't just pain; it's also trouble. So I think "It's not worth the trouble" is a better rendition.

/me a native English speaker, who learned French by immersion aged about 6.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#308

Post by m000 »

decaffjoe wrote: post #201

This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you'…

I think you've missed the topic entirely. From the abstract: "There is considerable debate about whether bilingual children have an advantage in executive functioning relative to monolingual children."

This seems to be aimed at debunking the urban (expat?) legend that raising your children to be billingual will somehow make them smarter.

In the end, this perception may end-up being just the adults' attempt to soothe their feelings of guilt for the inconveniences their children have to go through because of their international career.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#309

Post by kriro »

The_Colonel wrote: post #282
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. But that's not what the paper studied. It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increa…

> 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 asked me which languages I'd feel confident speaking or something similar I'd certainly include Englisch even though I learned it in school/from books/TV and neither of my parents speak it. I'd find it much more interesting if they could somehow split between people raised in a bilingual environment vs. people that learned another language.

Re: Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

#310

Post by KptMarchewa »

decaffjoe wrote: post #201

This topic misses the forest for the trees. Even if there is a cognitive difference in people who speak multiple languages, the magnitude of the advantage/disadvantage pales in comparison to the far more impactful difference in the understanding of the world that proficiency in another language gives you. If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you'…

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.

Post reply on HN