Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620903113

by amadeuspagel • 3 years ago

351 415 3 years ago

journals.sagepub.com

ofalkaed8• 3 years ago

It absolutely adds advantage to those interested in literature, it allows you to see your first language outside itself and generally increases your understanding of your first language. I would consider that a cognitive advantage but it is not exactly an advantage for the general public. Interestingly (at least to me) I have found programming languages* even more beneficial in this sense which I also find ironic, stem sorts often seem to miss the nuances of spoken/written language but as a humanities sort the hard line logical brutality of programming languages has given me valuable perspective on the nuances of the spoken languages.

*I apparently forgot what this footnote was for, like I said, I am a humanities sort

version_five3• 3 years ago

Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests. I'm certainly in the camp that bilingualism is helpful in all sorts of ways, and is almost an objective way to be "smarter" - but if the paper's legit, presumably bilingualism doesn't automatically boost other cognitive functions (somehow I picture those things where you have to say which shape comes next)

ofalkaed8• 3 years ago

Sounds like these were some kind of raw cognitive tests.

Absolutely. Outside some niche areas being bilingual is not going to make you better at general problem solving, will come in handy on occasion in that you will see the problem from a perspective that you would not have without a second language but generally will not add much. Like I said, I am a humanities sort so these sorts of things tend to trigger me. I think for the majority of people a second language should be a pragmatic choice, not about some vaguely suggestive idea of increased cognition but directly about what learning that language will offer them.

jacquesm9• 3 years ago

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 expect you to be less good at other subjects because you've just filled up a bunch of your brain with knowledge leaving less room for other things assuming your storage is finite.

ofalkaed8• 3 years ago

I would probably say if you are going to go to learning a third language than you would probably have been better off studying linguistics instead of that second language which will make all language acquisition easier. But hindsight, how many learn a second language with the intent of learning a third or forth? and once you learn that third you probably are going to have a decent intuitive grasp on linguistics even if you can not maintain a discussion with a linguistics major.

wolverine8762• 3 years ago

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.

dbtc2• 3 years ago

Connections across cultures and broader abilities to empathize are exactly what a general public or a society needs to be healthy. Humanities should not try to assert its worth in utilitarian terms; by playing that game it has already given up its own.

I agree with programming's effect on natural languages, and I think it goes both ways. Programming makes me a more precise punctuator, while Shakespeare makes me comment in couplet.

nomilk• 3 years ago

It adds advantage to those interested in literature

That's a specific skill though, as distinct cognition generally

gxt• 3 years ago

Anybody got a link to the full paper? Being bilingual myself I find the conclusion at odds with my anecdata.

I'm curious to know what were the tests were and corrected factors.

eru15• 3 years ago

Have you corrected for the obvious confounders in your anecdata?

sandkoan• 3 years ago

https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf

kranke155• 3 years ago

Without access to the actual Paper I don’t know anything about the cognitive test that was performed, so no idea what to think of it.

Without the actual Paper we are just reading a footnote.

Cenk2• 3 years ago

PDF is available here: https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf

gwern• 3 years ago

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15251117179700741...

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

That seems to reflect my lived experience. Do bilingual people in general seem to be more intelligent? I don't think so.

But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.

That doesn't mean you can have the tool and immediately gain the benefits of having it. It just means that compared to someone who does not have the ability to speak a second language, you have less friction to access domains of knowledge locked behind languages other than your native tongue.

Having a second car doesn't automatically mean I travel more. But if I used that other one specifically for roadtrips, it puts me in a category of people that is far smaller than the general population or even the general population of drivers.

MichaelZuo3• 3 years ago

If 'bilingualism' is expanded to include math and programming languages I would say it does effect intelligence directly.

But then again I haven't met many super-geniuses to compare against.

elbigbad2• 3 years ago

If “bilingualism” is expanded even further to include having wealthy parents who are legacies at Harvard, I would say it does have an effect on outcomes.

tstrimple• 3 years ago

I have to imagine there are parallel benefits as well. Just as a Java developer will become a better Java developer by learning programming languages with other paradigms, I have to believe knowing multiple spoken languages has tangible benefits outside of understanding the language itself.

qsort2• 3 years ago

A Java developer becomes a better Java developer if they learn alternative concepts that Java doesn't empasize as much. Learning Lisp, Haskell or C is going to be useful, for example.

But a Java developer won't become a better Java developer if they learn C#, which is basically Java with different capitalization conventions.

I guess something like that happens for natural languages. You get those benefits if you actively learn new concepts. The difference of course is that you are unlikely to have done that purely by being bilingual. Many bilingual people just picked up 2+ languages as they were growing up.

slibhb• 3 years ago

I'm not so sure. Natural languages are not very much like programming languages.

When you speak a language fluently you're able to speak and understand without thinking about it. Children can be fluent with no formal training in grammar. Meanwhile, for me at least, programming is the opposite: I have to learn all the rules on a formal level and my mind can't wander while I'm programming at all.

I think the benefits of knowing more natural languages are pretty clear: the ability to speak to and understand more people. Plus the art, entertainment, and other cultural productions you get access to.

courgette6• 3 years ago

French being my first language, I can says the same things with fancier words in english.

But sometime I will use English turn of sentences in French and it sounds weird ( just did it a l’envers here, pretty sure “turn of sentence” does not exists in English )

I’m ok at Spanish too. My main motivation is to be able to talk to random peoples when traveling. English came de facto because of the internet and US soft power.

Not sure it makes me better at writing or speaking.

ajmurmann• 3 years ago

One thing bilingualism has allowed me to do is differentiate better between the words and the things the words represent. This is mostly driven by words from different languages that translate to each other, not sharing all meanings of words. Of course I cannot think of an example right now that usefully illustrates how this leads to insights. It has explicitly come up in some philosophical discussions with friends and family who were going down a path intellectually that was driven more by the language than what it represents.

IMO, your programming language comparison is somewhat similar in that even knowing multiple, similar languages allows you to differentiate between the syntax and the concepts expressed by the syntax. E.g. different ways of constructing classes and objects in different languages will make you understand the core of OOP better, similarly to different ways to loop, etc.

throwawaylinux• 3 years ago

But, like many other things in life, the access of even a second language in my opinion gives you another tool to use as intellectual leverage to gain greater or richer understanding to many specific domains that you would otherwise require someone else to digest the information for you.

What are some of those domains, do you think?

rnjesus• 3 years ago

personal example, but after studying mandarin for many years, i can read original texts (like novels, non-classic poetry, and so on) without having to wait for someone to translate it first

qsort2• 3 years ago

- You can not be an effective software developer if you don't speak English (it's a second language to many of us).

- If you are interested in literature, history, philosophy or adjacent fields, reading sources in their original language is an advantage. Philosophers are more likely to be fluent in German, for instance.

- Reading news in foreign languages is often illuminating.

- Most translations are just extremely horrible. I can only understand a tiny amount of languages, but I'd rather put in the effort to read in a foreign language than suffer through bad translations.

evilduck• 3 years ago

Probably depends if your view is outside of a popular language looking in or inside a popular language looking out.

If you only speak English you probably aren't lacking access to to many fields of study. If you a one of the few who only speak Koro, you probably feel differently about to volume of knowledge available to you.

dukeofdoom• 3 years ago

One benefit if you know another language, you are more likely to have experienced living in a different culture. So you may take a more meta and critical view of the current cultural trends, not feeling as much pressure to conform.

Cenk2• 3 years ago

Link to PDF: https://oa.mg/pdf/10.1177-0956797620903113.pdf

eru15• 3 years ago

Thanks. That was an interesting read.

jvanderbot2• 3 years ago

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)

Spooky23• 3 years ago

It also makes it easier to get daycare subsidies for working parents.

version_five3• 3 years ago

Sort of related: in english Canada, french immersion often ends up being a way to send your kids to a better public school, and for whatever reason the english / french kids (as in enrolled in those programs) tend to split along socioeconomic lines.

hydrok9• 3 years ago

and they often get away with a low level of fluency by the end of it.

mpsprd2• 3 years ago

I'm curious about how french immersion works in English speaking Canada. It's something seen as "higher class"?

I live the mirror situation: french speaking young parent intending to make my child bilingual at a young age.

Here english is obviously seen as an edge and is studied a lot.

eru15• 3 years ago

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?

tshaddox• 3 years ago

Yeah, kinda weird to point it out as if there is some conflict of incentives between costs and benefits. It's a pretty darn good language to pick even if you just wanted your child to learn another language regardless of costs.

jvanderbot2• 3 years ago

I'm only saying that the primary motivation for Spanish immersion, good or bad, is probably cheaper child care costs, for the center, not the parent. Our kids are in one. Or were, until we moved.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

better could be having a work life balance system or remote work setting where the child can grow up with the love and attention a caring mother could provide

fnord774• 3 years ago

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

carlosjobim2• 3 years ago

What could be better?

Paying better salaries to working people.

psychlops• 3 years ago

You could make a similar argument about public education. However, your pariah status will no longer rank as mild.

gumby• 3 years ago

I am surprised that someone might think it should. When I consider my extended family, more than half of them use two or even three languages on a daily basis but in terms of “smarts” seem to be normally distributed, with no special correlation in this regard.

So I’m unsurprised by the conclusion of a rigorous and larger study.

seizethecheese4• 3 years ago

This is just an observational study. It seems fairly useless for understanding whether a given person will be smarter if they learn a second language.

Looks like the “controlled for” socioeconomic status, but I doubt this fully captures the difference in populations between bilingual and non-bilingual people.

It could be that the population of bilingual people, had they not been bilingual, might have scored lower on these tests, and therefore being bilingual brought them up to par. Impossible to tell.

bugglebeetle2• 3 years ago

A result that can only be surprising in places where monolingualism is the norm, like the US, and knowledge of other languages (outside of those acquired from one’s family) is taken as a sign of erudition. If you’ve ever spent time in countries like Switzerland, you’d know their are plenty of people who speak 2 or more languages but are otherwise of average intelligence.

lisasays5• 3 years ago

Switzerland is a bad example, because it's socially and multilingual.

Whereas if one looks at basically monolingual societies (e.g. most of the countries in Europe) one find that not only is not everyone bilingual (and no, "everyone" does not speak English) -- multilingualism definitely correlates with class and education.

bugglebeetle2• 3 years ago

Why would Switzerland be a bad example in this context? The point of the study is that bilingualism does not afford cognitive advantage, so you have to consider countries where bilingualism is not associated with the factors you cite to see if this bears out. Pointing at other countries that function in the same way as the US in regard to a dominant language would just demonstrate more of the same as is found there.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

A study looking at the wrong variables, again...

bena• 3 years ago

This might be a thing where the correlation was the other way, so people got it in their heads that doing the thing would make them smarter.

Like any time you see an article about how intelligent people drink more coffee, or swear more, or wear hats more often than others. So people start cursing into their mugs while adjusting their caps.

And, it might be true. It probably is true. But none of those things made them intelligent. So intelligent people might have been more likely to have learned and spoke a second language. But that didn't make them intelligent. So aping the trappings of intelligence won't make you intelligent.

johndhi• 3 years ago

Welp that confirms it. I'll never learn another language.

crispyambulance2• 3 years ago

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 me it suggests that perhaps more "real-estate" in the brain takes on language when one is bilingual.

dron57• 3 years ago

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.

cmcconomy• 3 years ago

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

joseda-hg2• 3 years ago

Someone close to me suffered something similar, she lost Spanish but kept the ability to speak Lithuanian (Her native language) shortly before her death, doctor commented that it was something he had seen before

It made treatment complex, because no one knew enough Lithuanian to communicate to the degree necesary

cgarrigue• 3 years ago

Yes, depending on where the stroke/aneurysm the effect can be totally different. I had one a few years ago, I was still able to chat with my colleagues and the hospital staff in Japanese and English, as well as in French (my native language) with my family back in France. However when looking at texts in French or English, I was recognizing the letters but putting them together I wasn't recognizing the meaning behind them. It took me a few days before being able to decipher them again, but it took me 3 weeks before recovering a decent reading speed. But some blood that had escaped in my skull at that time was blocking some nerves linked to the vision, so I had a dead angle of around 45 degrees on my right side until the blood naturally disappeared.

GuardianCaveman2• 3 years ago

I think at that point it's a huge advantage but hopefully none of us have to be in that spot.

wsc981• 3 years ago

I believe there was indeed some research done in the past in which multi-lingual people would generally recover better from strokes compared to people knowing only a single language.

Perhaps additional "connections" are made in the brain that can be used when other "connections" are broken due to stroke.

Anecdotic-ally, my father also recovered quite well from his stroke and he knew Dutch, English and likely a bit of latin languages as well (had Italian and Chinese penfriends when he was young, often used Latin proverbs, ...).

IIAOPSW4• 3 years ago

Strokes that effect language come in two forms. One of which is you can understand speech but can't generate it (you can respond to verbal requests but your speech comes out as word salad if any). The other is you can generate speech but not parse it (you superficially participate in conversation, but its entirely one sided as your responses have nothing to do with what was just said). I don't know enough to tell you about multi-lingual cases.

Epokhe• 3 years ago

Was your mother a late bilingual? From this paper [1], we know that for late bilinguals, regions for each language are spatially separated in Broca's area. Broca's area is responsible for speaking, while language understanding is attributed to Wernicke's area*. It's possible that the stroke affected only the part of the Broca's region responsible for English speaking. And since language understanding is handled by another region, it wasn't affected.

*For completeness, according to current neurolinguistic models it's more complex than that, more brain regions are actually responsible for speech/understanding.

[1] http://www.nature.com/articles/40623

crispyambulance2• 3 years ago

As a matter of fact, yes, late bilingual!

cubefox3• 3 years ago

This seems mainly interesting for people from English-speaking countries, since everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.

lisasays5• 3 years ago

Everyone else nowadays is bilingual anyway.

Uh, no. According to statistics (and everyday observation), slightly less than half of "everyone" is.

cubefox3• 3 years ago

I think those are older people who didn't learn English in school.

cpursley6• 3 years ago

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.

oblio12• 3 years ago

Re-read their comment.

paulsutter• 3 years ago

It would be pretty easy to come up with criteria that support or dismiss benefits of learning two languages, or any pair of specialties at all given inherent tradeoffs

For example, folks who learn programming languages early and intensively have a certain analytical advantage. But this is not a positive in all situations. We all have limited energy/time/focus, so each area we learn necessarily costs us in other areas.

And that’s great. We should develop strengths and build on them. Our lives are short and our attention is limited

pizzaknife• 3 years ago

i feel so cheated - adnd has some explaining to do

makeitdouble5• 3 years ago

I couldn't get access to the article, and the abstract gives no relevant detail to what they are assessing on which subjects... do the other commenters have an access to it, or could eventually tell us more about how this study was done ?

Edit: pdf here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35682016&goto=item%3Fid...

AdrenalinMd2• 3 years ago

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 languages, I always feel as if I'm lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. I wish I only needed to speak one language, saving my mental capacity for other things. Constantly juggling languages doesn't help.

The main benefit of knowing multiple languages in everyday life is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.

Moreover, all my friends from my country also speak four languages. Unfortunately, I don't hear of people from Moldova faring much better than others.

*My mother tongue is Romanian, but everyone in Moldova also speaks Russian (due to the Soviet past). At school, I learned French and later studied in France. I picked up English mainly through computers and the internet. Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn. I don't feel any advantage in learning a new language either.

I would gladly trade Russian and French over knowing Dutch right now ;o) There are months when I don't speak those two so they are of little use for me anymore.

pb72• 3 years ago

I am also originally from Moldova and speak the same 4 languages. If I had to guess, this is fairly common in Moldova -- at least in private schools.

I would say there is a very mild advantage, even recognizing vaguely similar words in other languages when traveling. I find Russian to be very useful in a way that French and Romanian aren't.

English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish are the most "useful" as they each unlock a large part of the world that tends to prefer its own.

Edit: Spanish is probably on par with the others.

AdrenalinMd2• 3 years ago

Oh, salut ! (Romanian "salut" not French "salut", lol)

It's indeed still useful when traveling to those countries that speak these languages. But that's mere few weeks per year. English could have worked anyway as everyone is becoming proficient in English.

jacooper• 3 years ago

I think Spanish should be on that list tooz since its one of the core languages out there right?

rippercushions2• 3 years ago

Some interesting thoughts on what additional languages an English speaker would find the most useful for travel worldwide: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/35348/as-a-native...

But you need to make a lot of assumptions as to what is really the "most useful".

seri4l• 3 years ago

Add French to the list (unlocking the rest of Africa) and you have the 6 official languages of the United Nations.

type03• 3 years ago

I don't agree on French not being very useful it has lost some status but you can get by with it in many places of the World and I would put Hindi and Swahili on that list too.

RajT883• 3 years ago

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 sticking English words into sentences, but I will frequently mix words from my second and third languages. It's brutal.

A friend of mine whose languages are Japanese, English, Spanish and Korean (in that order) told me that learning the third language is the hardest. Once you figure out how to stick to just one language at a time, learning more languages is a lot easier.

Cerium• 3 years ago

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.

Kamq2• 3 years ago

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.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

I wonder if it's different if you've studied the language vs if you grew up with it.

I learned polish from my parents when growing up and English from living in Canada and cartoons. My native tongue is English but I can speak polish fairly well and read and write it. I don't ever feel like I accidentally reach for polish or English words when I need the other.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

I had the same experience. German was my second, Chinese Mandarin my third. The first two years I was learning Mandarin, I found reading, writing and listening were fine. However, when it came to actually speaking, I was constantly stuttering because my brain wanted to substitute in German words instead of Mandarin words.

My girlfriend at the time natively spoke two languages (English and Hokkien) but was less proficient in both than many people who were only native speakers of one of them. She did, however, manage to pick up Mandarin a whole lot easier than I did.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

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.

nohaydeprobleme8• 3 years ago

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 "that's life").

Perhaps in one's native tongue, the idioms and phrases that are fitting to an idea come to mind easily, whereas in a second language, you may need additional effort to find roughly equivalent phrases that are not exact translations.

That may or may not be relevant to the thinking pattern you were mentioning, though I figure the lack of direct translations can sometimes be a barrier to fluency. The idea of "untranslatability" (aka the lack of a direct translation) was also explored last week in an interesting HN discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35629354

dragonmost• 3 years ago

If you have to translate in your head when using your non-native language that you have not mastered the language enough yet. I often think in english nowadays even if it is not my native or my everyday language, no translation required. Each language has advantages in certain contexts.

leethomas• 3 years ago

The main benefit of knowing multiple languages is eavesdropping on people in the street speaking their language, but that's about it.

Hah, that's the least of benefits IMO. I'm not sure if you have no interest in the following or just forgot them, but these are things I enjoy: literature in the native language, comparing words and idioms and understanding how different languages influence each other and also how different cultures led to the creation of certain idioms. Conversations with people in their native tongue when I travel and the stories, adventures, and knowledge that unlocks.

To anyone reading this who only speaks English, while I agree with this person and the study that I don't necessarily feel smarter, learning another language is absolutely worth it for the advantages I stated above. My life is more rich because of it.

notdang2• 3 years ago

Completely agree with you, I have the same experience, just that instead of French, it's Spanish for me. In French I am not fluent, but it still adds up to the mess.

p.s. adrenalin from IRC?

koyote• 3 years ago

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)

* Connecting with people.

Simply switching to someone's native tongue gives you a familiarity with someone that takes much longer to get if you're speaking their 2nd (or 3rd) language.

* Bragging

Especially in the US/UK you'll get a lot of positive comments from people because they think you're some kind of genius (which the study above disproves...)

Before I started working, I thought knowing this many languages would be helpful in the business world, turns out I have barely ever used them as the working language is always English.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

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.

cjohnson3183• 3 years ago

Connecting with people.

I have a tiny bit of halting Spanish, but I feel much more comfortable communicating that way than trying drag an interaction along with just English.

kazinator• 3 years ago

But these are confounding factors related to your socio-economic status. You're probably smarter than someone who is too poor to travel, uneducated, and who will die in the same village they were born. But it's not because you know more than one language.

AnnaPali3• 3 years ago

Assimil Dutch is an amazing course! It brings you to B2 in about 45 hours of applied study (just doing as the instructions tell you!) I really like Assimil courses in general but the polyglot community widely believes that the Dutch course is their best of all.

Good luck!

jb1991• 3 years ago

Unfortunately it seems to be out of print, not available anywhere. Maybe the company is going out of business?

wenc• 3 years ago

I speak 7 (4 acquired as a child, 1 in school, and 2 as an adult) and I find I'm able to understand understand cultural nuances better, which helps me to bridge cultural gaps and have multi-perspectival views on most things. (this is quite apart from the unproven Sapir-Whorf hypotheses stuff about language influencing thoughts -- it's not like that at all). Having multiple languages simply gives me affinity for multiple cultures and helps me pay attention to certain details that are easily missed by people not of that culture.

Being able to live between cultures isn't necessarily something that is prized by many, but having been an outsider in every culture I've ever lived in, this ability has helped me become a chameleon and blend into new cultures (corporate cultures, community cultures etc.) in order to feel a sense of belonging.

So the benefits for me are purely sociological -- I agree that being multilingual confers little advantage in terms of performing executive tasks (which is what the linked article was testing).

oblio12• 3 years ago

You've probably invested thousand of hours in learning all of those languages. Some just by circumstance/luck (maybe something like this? mom speaking 1 language, dad speaking another, both speaking a common language, the place you were in having another secondary language), some through your own efforts.

As always, the real question we can't really test is: what could you have done with probably literal person-years of study/research/leisure time, instead?

rjzzleep• 3 years ago

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...

isaacfrond2• 3 years ago

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.)

denton-scratch8• 3 years ago

Here's a paper that most people have not read

I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.

I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.

But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.

Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.

So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.

Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.

nohaydeprobleme8• 3 years ago

As a reader of the research paper, another limitation of the study is that the study did not appear to differentiate between people who learned a second language as an adult, versus people who grew up bilingual.

To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."

From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:

"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?

"6. How many languages do you speak? Select one: 1-20"

I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.

From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.

The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.

In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0042...

florakel2• 3 years ago

Í speak 4 languages and I love it: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and English. I have lived or worked in countries where those languages are spoken. Each language feels like a unique perspective on life and unlocks the understanding of a new culture for you. When talking to a taxi driver or reading a local newspaper you will be confronted with words or phrases that have no literal translation into your mother tongue. For a moment you are left without clear references and you have to make a significant cognitive effort to understand a concept that does not exist in your native culture (and therefore language). The construction of new references and meanings is what makes learning a new language all worth it. Understanding a new way to describe this world (while ideally living in a different culture) can make you a more empathetic, curious, and serene human being - in opposition to the polarizing black and white thinking that dominates most parts of the world these days.

tharkun__2• 3 years ago

You seem to speak 4 languages so well that at least in one of them you can't count to 5 ;)

Please take this tongue in cheek, as in kind of like the other comment said: for lots of folks splitting that atte tion is detrimental at least in some regard.

Personally I think some diversification in language is good. It "keeps you on your toes". If you never use a muscle it will deteriorate. But you won't be able to exercise all of your muscles equally all the time.

That said I do get your point about viewpoints. It's so easy to just have exactly one if all you speak is one language. Plenty of places in the world today where that is the case. And it's not just the ones we see in the international news all the time.

_pigpen__• 3 years ago

lacking a certain level of expertise in each one. Couldn’t you be describing the other end of the Dunning Kruger effect? As an intelligent person, you are painfully aware of the limits of your knowledge?

wudangmonk• 3 years ago

I really can't relate to most of your points. Words either come naturally as they do for everyone else or you don't use the word in that language therefore you will try to guess it or think of a similar one. This just means that you are not exposed to the same vocabulary in both languages. All my Comp Sci and Math vocabulary is in English because of school/online/talking to others. All my botany and plant knowledge knowledge is in Spanish because its my mother's hobby and that's how I know it. Only if I switch the languages will I struggle with the vocabulary.

The only time when I felt having to use more mental capacity was when I wasn't fluent in the language, the idea of languages being a constant cognitive load is as ridiculous as thinking that you are better off not knowing anything at all due to the toll knowledge takes on your mental capacity.

nohaydeprobleme8• 3 years ago

I also don't experience the extra cognitive load of choosing between languages when trying to express ideas, unless I'm trying to learn a new vocabulary word that I'm not familiar with. In specific, I can't relate to the commenter's point that: "When trying to think of a word, it comes to you in four different languages, which isn't helpful!"

As objective evidence, I use a software app called Glossika to practice listening and speaking to some extent, where the software plays a spoken English audio phrase and pauses before playing the translated audio. When I see the English for the phrase "The computer crashed" in Spanish track, the Spanish equivalent only comes to mind, and I don't simultaneously think of the French translation—even though I'm later asked to translate the same English phrase in the French track. At the start of each track, I have a certain context in mind (to make responses in a particular language), so I don't personally struggle with having to consciously focus to avoid mixing up words. In my experience, after at most ~20 seconds or so working in the target language, I say the right translations without any extra conscious effort of avoiding the usage of the wrong language.

The same goes for conversation practice. At the very worst—sometimes at the very start of a conversation—I can mix up a basic word. But after about less than a minute or so of speech, I'm think and express only in the language I'm practicing; I don't continually struggle with interference with other languages.

For my personal experience, studying both French and Spanish has even been beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Learning that "le public" means audience in French made it a lot easier to shortly after remember that "el público" also means audience in Spanish. The sounds in French and Spanish are different, along with the words that typically surround new vocabulary words, so I don't personally struggle with choosing between different word options from different languages.

Speaking French and Spanish also has a separation due to the way that pronunciation physically feels. The back-of-the-throat guttural R in French especially feels and sounds a lot different than the Spanish trilled R with a vibrating tongue near the front teeth—so there is a barrier to mixing up French and Spanish words with these different sounds, as they "feel" very different to say in the mouth and throat. Spanish words also have a "stress" on the second-last syllable or syllable with a certain accent (e.g. Le envió for "I sent it to you" with a stress on the accented ió), whereas French has roughly equal stresses as a "syllable-timed" language [1], so the feelings of speaking the languages are very different, even if the vocabulary can be similar at a first glance.

In summary, I just can't relate at all to the idea of "juggling" between languages from practice with audio programs and conversation practice each week, though I recognize that different people have different experiences.

[1] https://ielanguages.com/french-stress.html

IIAOPSW4• 3 years ago

I don't see why its ridiculous. Brains are not magically above the constraints of information lookup from a database. The more you know, the more you have to sort through somehow.

notdang2• 3 years ago

Don't know how ridiculous it is, but I live in a Spanish speaking country, using English at work, consuming English part of the internet, occasionally using Russian during the day (because of Russian "refugees") and no one around me speaks my native language. There is a cognitive load.

udev• 3 years ago

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" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

I learned from French that there are way more words for expressing feelings than I was using before, and also a certain way of having no-pressure intellectual, exploratory conversations, exchanging ideas among peers. It has a certain rhythm and many turns of phrases that work very well for this.

In Romanian you can be incredibly sophisticated (via modern French influence), but also stay close to the agricultural and pastoral roots. The language just has this great dynamic range. Romanian literature has examples of great works that are essentially collaborative, and have hundreds maybe thousands of authors (some likely illiterate), and that were passed along in oral form with various modifications that were finally recorded and published less than two centuries ago, and are very much readable by modern speakers.

===

Bonus: More things that I learned from English are certain expressions that guide you into a (I think) pragmatic world view, e.g.:

  - thinking clearly about hidden assumptions, e.g. "don't make assumptions", is easy in English, but is convoluted and indirect in the rest of languages I speak.

  - what I call "scoped" phrases, e.g. "just because IDEA1 does not mean IDEA2", or "IDEA1, though IDEA2", where English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much, by making it easy to "scope" your statements, but also helps you to be explicit about the boundaries within which your statement is true: "Just because I refused your first request, does not mean I don't want you to try again."

dbtc2• 3 years ago

I read your comment (fascinating!) and the parent, and I'm thinking a language is a tool, and like all tools, what matters most is how you use it.

valenterry• 3 years ago

Thank you, I find those insights very interesting!

lostmsu3• 3 years ago

How do you translate parachute to Russian?

brabel2• 3 years ago

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 me.

brabel2• 3 years ago

English language helps you to avoid exaggerating or generalizing too much

I speak English and another 3 languages. IMO this is not due to the language itself, it's 100% cultural. English has as much power as any language I know (Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish) to make exaggeration and generalization, it just seems to happen that most English speakers tend to use those less then, say, Brazilians (but probably more than Swedes, I think).

red-iron-pine• 3 years ago

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" and, if you have the skill, it will carry over the original style, atmosphere, and colour. Not sure how to explain this, but e.g., you can almost get a feel for the New-York accent reading a good translation into Russian. I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

Nabakov didn't feel the same way.

That said, as someone with decent Russian, I do like the language in many ways. I agree that it's a nuanced and powerful language in ways that English isn't; English is so ambiguous and low-context that you can say anything but I love Russian in that I can state things like number, gender, if they go & come back / complete, and do so in a word or two.

See also: high context vs low context languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

emptystation• 3 years ago

I speak Russian fluently but I wish I didn't. I don't find it beautiful and the information that I've involuntarily consumed in Russian throughout all my life did more harm than good.

Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.

type03• 3 years ago

I heard from several people that Arabic has a similar power of expression.

Not all types of Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic, some are different enough to be considered a different language as different as Nigerian Pidgin and British English.

I learned from Russian how incredibly powerful and nuanced a language can be (too bad it is currently used to scare people everywhere).

I don't find Russian to be particularly more expressive than any other bigger slavic language, like Polish or Yugoslavian. I would say that it's largely a myth propagated by Russians. It has a bunch of newer loan words from French, German and kept some of its' older synonyms, oh and a lot of archaics from Old Church Slavinic. In that sense it isn't more nuanced than English. One more con is that the convoluted sentence structure makes it an unfriendly language for non native speakers to learn. Phonetics are terrible, a bunch of my friends that had been studying Russian fairly well and still don't know how to pronounce those rarely used words.

How is Russian language used to scare people? If you live in EU and hear a lot of Russian you shouldn't be scared since a lot of them are Ukranian refugees from the East and South. There are very few Russians you should be scared of, except some angry and very drunk ones in tourist resorts, fortunately those aren't coming in droves anymore.

I speak a few different languages, knowledge of languages is overrated if you don't use them regularly. Actually I regret learning some of those, that time would have been better spent on acquiring some technical skills. I have met very few people that are truly bilingual, most of them say they are, but aren't actually equally as good in both. A lot of Ukranians are bilingual btw, but it's easier when two languages are that similar.

TMWNN• 3 years ago

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've heard that there is an unusually high rate of mental illness among European Parliament translators.

nohaydeprobleme8• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I couldn't find a supporting result after a few quick searches on Google Scholar and regular Google.

At most, I found a systematic review article [1] with the conclusion that interpreters for refugees experience higher levels of emotional and work-related stress, but it seems like this is more of a result of the content being translated, versus the act of translation.

It seems plausible, too, that assuming the claim is true (though I couldn't source an article to confirm this), it may alternatively be a result of the content of the translation or the pressure of the job (e.g. there may be serious consequences if there are mistranslations), versus the act of translation itself.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.7107...

maxFlow• 3 years ago

I speak four languages out of necessity, not by choice.

I also speak four languages and mostly agree with your take. I'm native in Spanish; English I learned gaming, and reading Tolkien as a kid. The other two, German and French due to a combination of self interest, education and travel. While I often fantasize about picking up a couple more (namely Norwegian and Japanese), I quickly become disappointed as I go through the motions all over again. It's a huge mental effort for a seemingly low _tangible_ ROI.

Sure, listening to music or reading in the target language and understanding most of it is quite the magical experience, probably similar to what cracking a secret code feels like; but there is no practical gain to it afterwards. It's a bit like reading/writing poetry: an intense but ephemeral enjoyment. More of an art form than anything else really. Unless, of course, you find yourself immersed in the language by way of relocation, then it truly does make sense to learn it. I do get your point with Dutch though: now you've got to figure out a fifth system for conveying an idea you're perfectly capable of saying in four other systems; it gets tiring.

I've been comparing it with programming languages lately. The question often pops up in HN: "what's the best programming language to build a backend in?" -- imagine you already can build a great backend in Python/Go/TS but you start picking up Rust only for the purposes of building said backend, what's the point? Just use whichever language you know best and build the damn thing already. Simple enough right? As is often the case though, this type of analysis is superficial; you may build a fantastic backend in say, Clojure, but then miss out on the opportunities a more popular language with a larger community may have to offer (e.g. Python). Writing Python may not necessarily provide general cognitive advantages over writing Clojure, but it will give you easier _access_ to the entire ML ecosystem, for instance. Does being capable of using more powerful tools help develop cognitive advantages?

I only read the abstract, but even if _Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages_, learning a second language, English specifically, has unquestionably changed my life.

e63f67dd-065b• 3 years ago

The good (?) thing is that you can absolutely forget languages -- I used to, as a small child, speak both Cantonese and Hokkien fluently; after more than a decade and half of not speaking or hearing a single word, I have now completely lost the ability to do so. I was in Hong Kong right before COVID and was flabbergasted that I literally couldn't understand most of what I was hearing and was completely stuck when trying to speak Cantonese.

I'm not sure if speaking more languages exhausts some kind of mental capacity -- that's not my experience at all. There was a time when I spoke nothing but English for years, a time when I spoke 4 languages, and now I speak both English and Chinese daily; I haven't really observed any differences in my proficiency. My Chinese proficiency has probably gone back up to native status after atrophying in my college years of not speaking a single word.

cpursley6• 3 years ago

Every Dutch person I’ve meet in the Netherlands speaks English fluently. Not a reason not to peruse Dutch of course!

But Russian (former Soviet space) and French (Africa) have large population that often have no little English fluency.

Which opens up a lot more cultural doors.

cpursley6• 3 years ago

And French is poised to grow big time with the rise of Africa. While Europe is in population decline into the foreseeable future.

GoblinSlayer4• 3 years ago

I would understand if it was Finnish, but really Dutch is yet another european dialect. What problem could it hypothetically ever pose to learning?

e12e4• 3 years ago

Now, I'm in the Netherlands and need to learn another language, but this one is proving slow to learn.

I've heard people that speak many languages fluently claim that it gets easier after the fifth language - so keep at it.

One tip; try as much as possible to stick to switching only between your mother tongue and the new(est) language you're learning - or at least have as many full days as you can where you avoid switching to other foreign languages.

Until you become fluent in the new language (say about a year if living/working in the new language).

tgv3• 3 years ago

Except Dutch doesn't resemble the other languages. The fact that my proudly unpatriotic countrymen (who secretly still believe that The Netherlands is the best place in the world) will start speaking in (broken) English as soon as they pick up a trace of a foreign accent, doesn't help either.

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

I'm not too surprised. The advantage of learning another language is a social one. You increase the number of people you can speak with, thereby increasing your opportunities in life. Compare someone living in the US who can speak English versus someone who can't.

I hope they tackle "left-handed people are better at math" at some point. That's another one I'm tired of hearing about.

tnel77• 3 years ago

My theory: in the United States, speaking multiple languages can be a sign of coming from a more financially sound household. I wouldn’t expect a second language to be any better for the brain than studying math or learning to play an instrument. As always, the most important factor is money.

rahimnathwani• 3 years ago

Speaking more than 2 languages might be such a sign.

But where I live (in San Francisco) speaking exactly 2 languages is usually a sign that you or your parents are immigrants.

albert_e• 3 years ago

Outside the US ... the variables change a bit.

India for instance -- A typical kid in many places here (especially southern part of the country) has 3 languages formally taught in school and consumed as popular media daily.

Having privilege in these regions usually translates to levels of literacy like having reading ability (in addition to just speaking for trade), reading literature, speaking fluency, broader vocabulary, "better" accent, etc. -- all of which, in thousand different ways, signal one's socio-economic status in every interaction.

cshimmin• 3 years ago

I would be surprised if the majority of bilingual speakers in the US aren't first/second gen immigrants. Not exactly known to be "a sign of coming from" wealth

unix_fan• 3 years ago

Second generation immigrants struggle to speak the language of their parents, however. This happens at least with immigrants from my country to the U.S.

costco• 3 years ago

I think this it. In Michigan public schools at least there are mandatory language courses for 2 years but these do not get most people anywhere close to fluency. Apparently I'm qualified enough to get a 4 on AP German but at my peak I could only get about 60% of your typical Der Spiegel headline. Everyone I know that knows another language at at least roughly a C1 level knows it because of family. But I imagine there are some people with tutors or better schools who start early with a language and probably end up pretty good at it.

makeitdouble5• 3 years ago

On the finance part, I think it's complex, in particular relative to who.

For instance, immigrants will massively be bilingual in general. We could argue there are in a better financial and educational position than those who couldn't immigrate in the first place, but then relative to the country they live, they can be on bottom of the social ladder.

On the parrallel with studying other subjects, I think it rings true, the only difference would be that bilingualism can be "forced" upon children by circumstances or environment, where math or instruments usually come later and/or on a choice basis.

seizethecheese4• 3 years ago

Your theory is entirely wrong. Read the study. The bilingual cohort was poorer.

makeitdouble5• 3 years ago

There is a meta analysis coming to close conclusion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641133/

The interesting part being it's done on children still in their learning phase. The current article targeting 11000 makes me think it's done in a similar setting (catching 11000 adult working people for a study is just complicated).

In general when people are arguing about side effects of bilingualism, I think they care more about adults who more or less reached their full potential.

zeroCalories• 3 years ago

Being raised bilingual feels like having two second languages T_T

999900000999• 3 years ago

At least in the US this is often a sign of affluence, you need to have money to attend language school after your normal classwork.

I was very ignorant of this when I was younger, my first girlfriend was Korean , but couldn't really speak it since her parents( presumably) didn't put her in classes. On the other hand, if your parents have money for language classes, they probably can afford general tutoring. So your doing better in school than your classmates.

Before you mention public school language education, your lucky if your able to read attending a public high school. I went to one myself.

seizethecheese4• 3 years ago

The linked study shows the opposite. Bilingual cohort was twice as likely to be low socioeconomic status. This is likely dominated by lower income immigrants.

joseda-hg2• 3 years ago

As with most things it depends, I went to basically the most expensive school in my state (Not in the US), and never realized that it wasn't normal for everyone to actually learn the second language everyone has to take

Only after getting exposed to the rest of the world (And people making a big deal out of it) did I realize that it was a "class" thing

If the bilinguals are mainly economic migrants, sure, I'd expect the correlation to be different

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

Aren't there studies in Linguistics that show that the Chinese have an advantage in mathematics due to the nature of their numerical system? and conversely the French have a disadvantage?

lisper4• 3 years ago

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 you're young, but is nearly impossible to acquire later in life.

seizethecheese4• 3 years ago

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.

lisper4• 3 years ago

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 advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young immigrant children challenged by poverty..."

which implies that there is a "cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism".

So maybe the original study is just bogus. Or maybe this one is. Who knows? Sociology doesn't have a stellar reputation for generating reproducible results.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

The study was based on 'test your brain health!' type online surveys/games hosted by Cambridge Brain Sciences. The user portal is https://brainlabs.me/ . They just grabbed a sample of 40k people who played certain games and dumped it into some data processing software. It's absolutely par for the course for modern social science studies, but makes any conclusions of dubious value for countless reasons.

Put another way, I think the discussion is probably at relevant as the study.

pazimzadeh4• 3 years ago

I agree with you. I once had an argument with a monolingual English-speaking person who was convinced that language is necessary for thinking, or that thinking somehow comes from language, which couldn't be further from my experience where I will have an abstract thought and then try to put it into words.

However it took years for me to be conscious of the abstract thinking. I started out by thinking in my native tongue, then thinking in my native tongue and mentally translating into English, then thinking in English, before finally not thinking in any language at all.

thejackgoode• 3 years ago

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.

mejutoco5• 3 years ago

About thinking, I always think (hah) of this quote:

"Lo que solemos elevar a la categoría de meditaciones no es más que el ruido de un motor encendido." Ray Loriga

My idiomatic translation: "What we usually elevate to thinking/thoughts is only the noise of a running engine."

I also believe language is necessary for thinking. I would define thinking as following the scientific method, though. That is, thinking is not necessary to tie my shoelaces or go shopping or dance (that I consider more autopilot, maybe like system 1 and 2?). But to make a rigorous argument, IMO one needs language. Under this definition of thinking it seems logic is pretty important, and logic seems to me language-based.

Aerbil3132• 3 years ago

Do people not able to think without language normally? Does everyone have an internal sound for everything they think all the time? I don’t, I am bilingual but I don’t think this is true. I’m surprised to hear that.

schwartzworld2• 3 years ago

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.

lisper4• 3 years ago

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.)

ggm• 3 years ago

The weak argument in favour was the ability to apply two (or more) linguistic models to rationalisations about things, and potentially uncover more in the distinctions between them. So on the abstraction/synthesis side of things.

hippich• 3 years ago

To me second language added ability to express something better. I also noticed that depending on a subject I subconsciously pick one or another language when thinking about the subject. Perhaps that's not what measured in this paper, but it is certainly an advantage for me.

EGreg• 3 years ago

“ and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors”

I would be interested to know how they managed to remove the potentially confounding factors.

To me, it seems clear: bilinguals whose language isn’t a major language of the country often come from immigrant families. Immigrants have a great work ethic and teach their kids in the foreign language. Then the kids work hard to fit in and learn the other language, too. They tend to be less interested in “decadent” activities and end up overachieving. This is especially true for immigrants from formerly Communist countries that prioritized STEM.

In the past, people learned Latin or German to access scientific literature etc.

Not to mention that learning two DISPARATE languages enables people to triangulate better on other languages and ways of thinking

dilawar• 3 years ago

Remind me of an article where three anthropologists were debating what does mean to be civilized. "Knowing one language makes us human, knowing more than one language make us civilised." is the only thing I now remember from that reading.

Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?

viraptor• 3 years ago

Does knowing more than one languages make you more reflective/liberal?

I believe some society traits leak through the language and you see a little bit more context when you learn a new language. (Especially with idioms, but separate words too) The in-your-face examples I remember now are the many polite ways to say "no" without saying "no" in Japanese, and Australian tribes using absolute directions (NESW) instead of relative. But there are more subtle ones too and I think they give you a better chance to be more open.

pazimzadeh4• 3 years ago

It's pretty obvious to people who speak 2+ language that there are trade-offs between "going deep" in one language and having "surface-level" knowledge of many languages.

The one thing they found which bilinguals might be better at has to do with digit recall, which actually agrees with previous research that bilinguals are 'more logical' in their second tongue and 'more emotional' in their native tongue.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/communicating-foreign-langua...

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-02935-000

https://www.languagemagazine.com/2023/04/21/bilinguals-react....

So the results may have been different if each participant was allowed to take the test in their mother tongue.

The list of things they tested is way too small to conclude that there are no general cognitive advantages. What is "general" anyway?

Things they didn't test:

- the ability to learn new languages

- the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context clues

- ability to communicate or get by in a brand new/unfamiliar environment

- ability to detect BS (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423309/)

- ability to improvise

- abstract thinking (not being limited by a linear inner voice)

- etc...

There are many confounding factors they didn't test for. e.g., what if the bilinguals are more logical, but have weaker comprehension of the question? do those things cancel out? Or, if being multilingual makes you "overthink" prompts and maybe you get penalized on time in standardized tests, etc...

According to their questionnaire, the "bilingualness" of participants was self-reported, all you had to do was enter a number between 1 and 20 for the number of languages you speak.. It would have been better if written and spoken proficiency in each of the second languages had been tested and used to correlate with the results.

I could go on. I think this is actually one of the worst studies I've ever read in terms of "confidence of the title" vs. "what they actually tested."

fnord774• 3 years ago

garbage study!

multilingualism was self-reported so they don't differentiate between someone who slept through 2 years of HS spanish and someone who grew up speaking both English and Chinese

The study was also done in a single geographical location. terrible

x62Bh7948f• 3 years ago

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. 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).

tuukkah• 3 years ago

Sounds like you may need to find a school that does not consider it a cognitive impairment, but you really should speak your native tongue to your children regardless.

oblio12• 3 years ago

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.

r0bot• 3 years ago

I think biculturalism offers the advantage more than just language.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 3 years ago

Next you'll tell me there are no learning styles, that whole language instruction doesn't work and that college doesn't teach critical thinking /s

I wonder how we end up with these "myths" in the first place. Bad research? Great marketing? How many more educational holy cows will come apart in the next decades?

paulpauper• 3 years ago

social desirability bias. people think it's true because they want to believe it's true, it sounds plausible that it's true

yosito4• 3 years ago

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.

teki_one• 3 years ago

It might be true, but it only means that don't learn/teach languages to gain cognitive advantages.

As a tool language is useful for many things. Gaining access to other culture(s) is one of the most amazing ones for me.

travisgriggs• 3 years ago

I've felt that being multi lingual, a virtual form of world travel, usually benefits people socially, and society in general, but have always figured there was zero cognitive "edge" it gave me others.

swellguy• 3 years ago

Dismissing an important skillset by pretending it could be magical is called clickbait. The advantage of knowing a second language is to be able to communicate and understand a new segment of humanity. This is like creating a paper: being able to pump gas into your car affords no general improvement in hair growth on your toes.

rippercushions2• 3 years ago

The paper is tapping on a long-standing debate about the effects of being bilingual. For a long time, it was thought that being bilingual was actively harmful, and indeed it's been shown in studies that babies with parents who speak different languages to them are slower to reach some linguistic milestones. Later research showed that this was just temporary, and not only was there no negative effect, but bilingual kids tended to do better on some tests of aptitude than monolinguals. And now this study is saying that no, maybe they're not better after all.

Wikipedia, as always, has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_effects_of_bilingual...

jletienne• 3 years ago

especially on a programming forum. Knowing Python, SQL, and R has been hugely beneficial. I can read Ruby scripts and colleagues can talk me through JS without me ever writing those.

Would be surprised if knowing multiple spoken language didn't help at all!

jmpman• 3 years ago

Una mas cerveza por favor…

cjohnson3183• 3 years ago

I 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.

joeyzm• 3 years ago

Because IQ testing is de facto illegal. Companies would much rather use them instead of proxies with varying degrees of accuracy.

cjohnson3183• 3 years ago

Companies would much rather use them instead of proxies with varying degrees of accuracy.

I sure wouldn't. I'd much rather ask someone about relevant experience than put them through an IQ test, or similar set of abstract puzzles.

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

I think this and a greater aspect of any deliberate, learned task making people "smarter" needs to be addressed.

The thing is, beyond critical developmental stages in early childhood, and barring significant environmental factors like lead poisoning or brain trauma, one's general cognitive abilities are largely a genetic phenomenon.

nayuki2• 3 years ago

I 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 are 那裏 (na li) / 他們的 (ta men de) / 他們是 (ta men shi).

This goes deeper and works for homonyms like free, which maps to 免費 (no cost / gratuis) vs. 自由 (freedom / liberty). It makes you think harder about what you mean when you use the word free.

Learning different languages challenges your assumptions. An Euro-centric upbringing would assume that spaces are required to separate words. Chinese and Japanese disagree with this and work just fine. 26-letter alphabet vs. thousands of characters. Implicit tones vs. prescriptive tones. Context-dependent letter shapes (Sanskrit). Optional/implied vowels (Arabic). Word order (SVO etc.).

zirgs3• 3 years ago

Funny how the Chinese have to use that 26-letter alphabet too, because you can't put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

DiogenesKynikos2• 3 years ago

Smartphones have changed this. You can write characters directly on a touchscreen. It's not as popular of an input method as pinyin, but it's not uncommon either.

There's also Bopomofo, as an alternative to pinyin input.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

nayuki2• 3 years ago

Chinese doesn't have to use A-to-Z with Pinyin. There are input methods like Cangjie, Wubi, Bopomofo, 1-to-9 stroking on number pads, and handwriting. But yes, pinyin A-to-Z is the most pragmatic for many reasons.

heyyeah• 3 years ago

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.

DiogenesKynikos2• 3 years ago

For people who are used to Indo-European languages, the biggest shock while learning Chinese will probably be that it's possible for a language to lack articles, plural forms, conjugation, tense, gender and case.

"I'm going to go buy three loaves of bread tomorrow morning at the bakery." -> "I tomorrow morning go bakery buy three loaf bread." The latter has no articles, tense, conjugation or plural forms, yet it's completely understandable.

Even if you learn all sorts of Indo-European languages, you'll still have a lot of assumptions about what sort of grammar a language should have that are not actually universal. Indo-European languages are quite grammatically complex.

IIAOPSW4• 3 years ago

Oh no! What arbitrary signifier will I use now to gatekeep education level and define a class based in-group. Please, I need an answer quickly, my whole identity is based on hasty judgemental heuristics!

innocentoldguy• 3 years ago

I speak two languages (English and Japanese). I've never thought of it as a cognitive advantage but rather a broader degree of experience and, perhaps, wisdom.

nanidin• 3 years ago

I wonder how this relates to the resilience conferred against dementia / Alzheimer’s by bilingualism?

decaffjoe• 3 years ago

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're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people. Who cares if your IQ went up or down half a point on account of learning to speak mandarin- your understanding of the lives of billions of people just increased dramatically. That's why it's good to learn a language- culture, not cognition.

emodendroket3• 3 years ago

That may be so, but if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much? I'm not saying the answers to these questions are obvious "nos" but the assumption could stand some scrutiny.

MobiusHorizons2• 3 years ago

I think the missing piece is engagement with the culture that is unlocked by being bilingual.

GoblinSlayer4• 3 years ago

I think it may debunk the myth about ability to fix all false friends that some americans seemingly believe in.

dlkf2• 3 years ago

if bilingualism is talking to your parents in kitchen Spanish without actually traveling anywhere, rather than learning the language of a culture that's alien to you so that you can spend an extended period of time there, is that just as enriching? Does an anglophone Canadian who learns French really expand their worldview that much?

Yes

routerl• 3 years ago

...you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people

And of American culture and its people. You might re-evaluate some ideas you'd grown up with, becoming a more cosmopolitan/adaptable/understanding person, capable of having deeper relationships with a larger proportion of the Earth's population.

But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity.

lostmsu3• 3 years ago

I don't think you really have to learn the destination country's language for that. At least it is unclear that the lack of language would be any kind of major roadblock.

mdp20213• 3 years ago

But it probably won't make you better at tests of cognitive capacity

How do you test «cognitive capacity»? The other day on these pages a newcomer came and wrote he "distrusts them <category>". Some call ignorance relevant to "cognitive capacity".

(Some call it "much more than just relevant".)

koreth1• 3 years ago

Globally, a very small percentage of bilingual people fit the "I decided to learn a different language and then used it to temporarily live in another country very different from my own" model. Much more common is, "I speak my local regional language and also the official national language, and so does everyone else in my community."

MobiusHorizons2• 3 years ago

True but many people also use that ability to travel to the local large city.

mdp20213• 3 years ago

Thank happiness that we have the World Wide Web (literally suggestive) and global publishing trade then, if some people do not move much physically.

Multilingualism is an enabler.

gehatare• 3 years ago

Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

"They forced us to learn it in school" is another one. E.g. what I heard about Lebanon: And by forced, I mean you don't just do a French lesson, you learn other non-language lessons in other languages.

HlessClaudesman• 3 years ago

Yeah, "Cognitive Advantages" is such a poor proxy for measuring a more enriched world view / life.

Let's say I live in a country of 3-4 million native language speakers, with next to zero speakers of my language internationally. Teaching a kid English at an early age opens them up to experiencing so much more than whatever happens to get produced / translated into my native lounge. When it comes to consuming information, would you rather your child was a great white shark or a bottom feeder?

Knowledge is a ladder, whose benefits compound over time, the end result is expertise. Also, understanding people from different nations is a good defence against parochialism, thinking that your people have al the answers.

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

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 increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.

That's different from how enriched you will be as a person from learning about other people and culture - 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.

paganel2• 3 years ago

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, even though I've been to France two or three times, I know a lot more about the country, its history, its moeurs as a result of me reading books directly in French (many of them never got translated, not even into English).

bryanrasmussen2• 3 years ago

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 understanding!

In short, speaking the language at least well enough to interact with the population is prerequisite for the increased understanding.

The_Colonel2• 3 years ago

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 process of learning them.

"learning" is an active mental process and those beneficial properties you mention are ascribed to this.

pdpi• 3 years ago

But that's not what the paper studied.

This is a recurring problem with science reporting. Falsifiability and reproducibility demand that good studies focus on very specific, well-defined effects. Then it gets reported as leading to much broader conclusions on the topic as a whole.

Counterintuitively, "missing the forest for the trees" is exactly what you want a study like this to do. You can let a later meta-analysis figure out how to make a forest out of the trees.

Aaronmacaron2• 3 years ago

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.

Not really. Language and culture are inseparable. In my opinion, you cannot learn a language without learning at least a bit of the culture too. Idioms, expressions, and the way people use language say a lot about their culture.

Apart from my own culture, I have by far the best understanding of Anglo-American culture because I speak English. I have never lived in an English-speaking country though. As soon as you speak a language, you can expose yourself to the culture where the language is spoken pretty easily through the internet, movies, etc. HN is a good example. I see what (mostly) American people think, what things are important to them, and the way they approach life on a daily basis on this site.

lelanthran• 3 years ago

But that's not what the paper studied. 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.

I find that it's actually worse for my wordle performance.

Occasionally I'll have a set of clues that lead to obvious words in my second language, but all these obvious words displace any English word that fits the clue.

I have to consciously rearrange the clues by writing them down in order to get the answer.

bedatadriven• 3 years ago

It's an academic paper with an intentionally narrow focus.

If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the _broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains_ that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals.

TbobbyZ• 3 years ago

There are advantages at the individual level to understand and communicate with multiple cultures. I would argue it’s more than an increase/decrease in IQ points. Did the individual increase in their free time and income is the only valid output worth measuring in bilingual advantages.

Levitz• 3 years ago

It's still an important piece of information, first because it disagrees with what we previously thought, second because there are fringe cases in which learning a language doesn't open you to anything else.

I'm Spanish and live in the Basque Country. Everybody speaks Spanish here, but we are supposed to also speak Basque. The idea that it's advantageous to learning and such is one of the main arguments used to justify a push to learn the language. Basque language was the subject I invested the most time in through my whole compulsory education, so frankly, I do care.

zarzavat• 3 years ago

Learning a second language as an adult or adolescent makes it vastly easier to learn additional languages later. So your time learning Basque was not wasted.

hungryforcodes• 3 years ago

Have started with English then learned Spanish (travelling through Latin America extensively), and now an Asian language, I have acquired all sorts of advantages and also new ways of thinking.

I really feel people on HN ARE sometimes missing the forest for the trees and I can't imagine how learning a new language could not be a good thing.

m000• 3 years ago

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.

KptMarchewa• 3 years ago

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.

david-gpu• 3 years ago

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 lingua franca of the world, the balance will slowly shift and include more cultural elements from places with large populations like India.

Language barriers prevent the sharing of culture and being able to communicate with a wide array of people is something to celebrate.

tgv3• 3 years ago

That is because it is considered wrong. There is no solid evidence, despite whole labs trying for decades. There are only very weak effects, and given the state of research in psychology, I'd be surprised to find one that has been consistently reproduced.

The weak examples also do not prove Sapir-Whorf. They can usually be explained from extra-linguistic learning that occurs while learning a language.

e12e4• 3 years ago

If you're a monolingual American born English speaker and you learn Chinese and go live in China for a year, you're going to come back with a much different understanding of Chinese culture and its people.

Less obvious, and IMNHO more significant is that you'll come back with a new perspective on culture; and as a result a new perspective on your own culture (now having a point of comparison).

jasfi• 3 years ago

They're looking at people who likely grew up as bilingual, who they say are not generally smarter than those who only know one language. There should still be cognitive benefits to learning new languages as an adult, just as learning any new skill.

anon223345• 3 years ago

“Measure what is measureable”

suthakamal2• 3 years ago

lol

suthakamal2• 3 years ago

Troglodyte research done at… lol… Western.

cat_plus_plus• 3 years ago

How good is independent variable control in this study? The most common reason for bilingualism is things going very wrong in the birth country for either you or your parents. In which case, cognitive disadvantage is expected due to malnutrition, preventable childhood diseases, parents not being best adjusted to host country culture and education system and so on.

On the other hand, voluntary bilingualism is a sign of opposite things. Even if it doesn't have an intrinsic cognitive advantage, your parents were thoughtful enough to provide that for you, which comes with a slew of both cultural and heritable factors. Your schools being able to offer successful foreign language programs is a sign of relative affluence. Plus, say if your mother tongue is English and your learn Mandarin. You are now able to better communicate with a billion people and have access to their opportunities. It's hard to imagine how this is not a practical advantage in life, any artificial benchmarks notwithstanding.

I would allow that becoming bilingual in English, Spanish or Mandarin is preferable to learning something that gives you less additional reach compared to just speaking your mother tongue, where benefits are harder to quantify.

rxyz• 3 years ago

This comment is so ignorant and America-centric that it made me angry. Wow

dumpster_fire• 3 years ago

It really depends on where the languages are from. I find learning languages from different worldviews helps me with judging other cultures less.

Someone on this thread said something about being able to consume content in other cultures. That's totally true. There's such a large delta between the knowledge base in each language that you get to cross pollinate ideas in your daily life.

There are some "feelings" and deep layers of nuance when speaking in one language that really can't be transferred to another unless you really immerse yourself in the media and literature.

Also to all my fellow multilingual people making sick puns that you laugh about to yourself inside, I see you.

typ• 3 years ago

One thing I find interesting about being multilingual is you can 'unlock' your different personalities and disrupt mental inertia a bit when speaking another language. It's like having one part of the brain take a break while activating other parts. But I also feel awkward speaking a different language in front of close friends when you are so used to speaking the 'default' language with them. It feels like you are exposing your other personality.

lIl-IIIl2• 3 years ago

That is very true. It does seem to me there's a subtle "personality shift" among some people when they speak a separate language.

Sometimes you see people become warmer and more affectionate because either they know how to be that way in their native language or it's more common in their culture (e.g. seeing a native Spanish speaker speak Spanish after knowing them only speak English).

There was also an interesting study about asking people solve trolley problems in their second language vs their first. Whe. Solving in their second language, the solution tended to be more utilitarian and logical.

geoalchimista• 3 years ago

But it offers you one more language to communicate with people. Isn't that enough?

DuckFeathers2• 3 years ago

Being able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether. This is easy to deduce with reasoning and I can confirm it (to myself) from experience. What psychological "science" has to say about it makes me question their study than anything.

It is important to remember however that not all bilinguals are equal. The languages have to be different enough. English, German and Swedish (all Germanic languages with very similar grammer) doesn't give you much freedom in comparision to German and Mandarin.

Find people who are fluent (i.e. they can think in different languages) in two languages that are far apart in the language tree and run the study again.

oblio12• 3 years ago

Being able to think in multiple languages frees the mind from thinking in language altogether.

I don't understand this.

sgt2• 3 years ago

Aside from that, don't underestimate the amount of thinking we do without language. What do we call that - raw braincode? So in that sense, we're all bilingual, even those only speaking English. I.e. you can think "I'm going down to the post office to post a letter with a stamp on it" without language.

DuckFeathers2• 3 years ago

True. But for single-language speakers (and even some bilinguals who haven't thought about this), it is easier to conflate the raw thinking and the language they associate with it (which we know happens after the fact)... because they only have one language to work with. A bilingual on the other hand will understand the concept instantly if they were to think about something as themselves in one language and the same thing as themselves in another language... and they don't have to rely on poorly designed studies to know these things.

Also, depending on how integrated the different language personalities are (probably depends on whether they learnt the language as a child or as an adult), they should also easily be able to see that they are not one personality but at least two personalities embodied in one being (which can then be taken further into understanding that what we think of our "self" is made up of many different personalities based on different contexts... which is all acquired from upbringing).

dlkf2• 3 years ago

An observational study with controls chosen at the whim of the PI is not the same as an RCT. Presumably you could implement different controls and observe the opposite conclusion. What scientists end up doing will be driven by the incentive to publish something novel, rather than a genuine search for truth.

vintermann• 3 years ago

Highlights more the absurdity of "general cognitive advantages" than anything else. In situations where you need a language, whether you're able to speak it or not trumps everything else. I can't perform even the simplest of tasks if the instructions are given in Chinese and I can't access a translation.

sgt2• 3 years ago

Probably a rubbish study. You can probably do the same with programming languages and show that knowing Lisp, Java and C won't give you any cognitive advantages. Just stick to Java and you'll have plenty of "cognition". We'll all know this is (as decaffjoe pointed out) completely missing the forest for the trees.

kriro2• 3 years ago

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 <=10 or try to correct for this by removing the most likely "school language" Englisch. At least I suppose it's possible that there is a difference between growing up with a language and "learning" it more actively.

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.

oblio12• 3 years ago

Luxembourg come to mind as natural bi- or multilinguals.

Speaking from experience with Luxembourg, their school results (PISA) are average despite sky high teacher salaries and a ton of investment into education. Especially STEM results. The more languages Luxembourg adds the worse results become (Portuguese immigrants fare worse than locals).

_xnmw• 3 years ago

There are different types of bilingualism. Making an active effort to learn a second language for no reason other than cultural interest is a totally different activity from being forced to learn the dominant language as a disadvantaged minority in a non-native land. The former is associated with genius, the latter is actually a crutch.

hzay• 3 years ago

Only in US there's this strange obsession with counting how many languages one knows. If I count, everyone in my family is at least bilingual, and most are >= trilingual. It's not unusual for someone to speak 4 languages (2 regional languages, nationally common language, english).

If you really want to look into effects on cognition, it's better to count language families rather than individual languages. Two dravidian languages might be so similar (one to one mapping of linguistic concepts) that cognitively it might not change anything.

In india, the poorest people often speak the most number of languages and their cognition is affected by a number of other factors related to poverty. I'm not sure how one can properly control for such factors.

vogon_laureate• 3 years ago

As a bilingual person beginning to experience symptoms of cognitive decline as I age, I can confirm anecdotally that I am now dumber in two languages.

ur-whale• 3 years ago

Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages

Oh, this goes so, so, so much against both intuition and actual, lived experience with the topic.

But then again, it's social "science" so why even pay attention when even something like "cognitive advantages" is an ill-defined, murky concept.

dghughes• 3 years ago

I see two different situations for bilingualism. One is to be raised from birth speaking two languages or as an adult learn a new language.

I'd say the situation as an adult requires much more effort. The learning should help brain neuroplasticity or cause neuroplasticity? However it works.

ulizzle• 3 years ago

A counterfactual is that higher IQ correlates with reading ability and language use. Those people are far more likely to know more than one language (because it's easier) and gain access to the deeper, more expansive pool of opportunities that comes with bilingualism.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

I'm from a Hispanic family which is by and large bilingual and uses quite a lot of Spanglish at family events. However, I was raised monolingual, with English. My parents say they sometimes regret not teaching me Spanish. But, on they other hand, they recognize that my English rhetorical skills are significantly better than they might otherwise have been. Given that English is a language with a wide vocabulary and quite expressive specificity, this confers all sorts of advantages to me, especially in technical applications.

I am most definitely a programming polyglot, however, and that was of my own doing. Learning many programming languages has most definitely had a profound effect on how I think about problems and break down sub-problems. I don't think it's made me smarter or more intelligent generally, but it has opened doors to solutions I would not have been able to consider otherwise, which is probably a good analogy for what this study is suggesting.

I have definitely settled in a nice generally-optimal zone of functional-procedural: Isolate state to referentially transparent procedures, and mutate all the state you want within those procedures, but the overall program structure should be a functional pyramid of value-returning calls.

Slapshot_gd• 3 years ago

For those experts in the field, curious how this study relates to this one : https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-17952-001 , I'm absolutely no expert in any of this, but I am bilingual and did encourage my kids to explore and learn new language(s).

amai• 3 years ago

„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.

blargke23• 3 years ago

TANSTAAFL. Any advantage is offset by a disadvantage.

poulsbohemian• 3 years ago

Does it boost my general cognitive advantages? Maybe not, but it sure changed my weltanschauugen.

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

I have long been suspicious when people tell me that learning multiple languages is "good for brain development". Primarily because, through most of human history, I believe the only situation where you would learn multiple (really exactly 2) languages is when your tribe was conquered.

Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

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