Why bilinguals are smarter

kalmisto · Post by **kalmisto** » Sat May 05, 2012 12:35 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opini ... alism.html?

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Rosamunda · Post by **Rosamunda** » Sat May 05, 2012 5:50 pm

Interesting. Monolinguals are actually in a minority.... I vaguely remember reading that the majority of people on Earth speak more than one language (though I have no idea of the percentage). I guess most Asian people speak more than one language fluently as do many Africans and some (a few?) Europeans.

The comments about dementia are interesting. My bilingual MIL has quite severe Alzheimers which started when she was still in her 60s. Although she is bilingual (Finnish/Swedish) since birth, once she moved to Pargas about 15 years ago she practically ceased to use her Finnish. I wonder if abandoning one of her languages contributed to the onset or the acceleration of the disease (there were other contributing factors too). Some days I am not even sure that she can still understand Finnish, even though it was her mother tongue.

onkko · Post by **onkko** » Sat May 05, 2012 6:30 pm

Rosamunda wrote:Interesting. Monolinguals are actually in a minority.... I vaguely remember reading that the majority of people on Earth speak more than one language

Bollocks, i can speak more than one than one language but im monolingual. Bilingual is one who had 2 or more languages as motherlanguage from start.
That if i learn other language doesnt make me bilingual.

ajdias · Post by **ajdias** » Sat May 05, 2012 6:45 pm

Yes, you are correct Onkko. Yet, bilinguals are still the majority of the world population.

Rosamunda wrote: I wonder if abandoning one of her languages contributed to the onset or the acceleration of the disease (there were other contributing factors too).

It's pretty hard to make inferences from a group to an individual case. I'm not familiar with the conclusions regarding dementia/Alzheimer but all that one could conclude is that she would have higher chance of being less affected/have the disease effect her at a slower pace.

onkko · Post by **onkko** » Sat May 05, 2012 6:47 pm

ajdias wrote:Yes, you are correct Onkko. Yet, bilinguals are still the majority of the world population.

According to what?

ajdias · Post by **ajdias** » Sat May 05, 2012 7:07 pm

onkko wrote:According to what?

To Google:

Percentage of world's children raised as bilingual speakers: 66 percent. Percentage of U.S. residents who are bilingual: 6.3 percent.

-- The Associated Press

Sources: Worldwatch Institute, Summer Institute of Linguistics

That's good enough for me, even accounting for some estimation error - you know, 1 billion more, 1 billion less

Rosamunda · Post by **Rosamunda** » Sat May 05, 2012 9:15 pm

Yes, they're the kind of numbers I had in mind. Of course you can always argue about the definition of monolingual versus bilingual versus something in between... but I don't think it is too difficult to come up with a working definition eg: people who use more than one language to communicate on a daily basis or, children who grow up speaking more than one language in the home etc etc etc. Of course that doesn't make them actively bilingual but, on the other hand, they are not strictly speaking monolinguals either. And like you say, give or take a billion...

DMC · Post by **DMC** » Sat May 05, 2012 9:19 pm

onkko wrote:Bollocks, i can speak more than one than one language but im monolingual. Bilingual is one who had 2 or more languages as motherlanguage from start.
That if i learn other language doesnt make me bilingual.

So it is only the languages that a person learns from "from start" that count? What age limit do you put on that? I'm not sure it is a useful definition.
I know someone who spoke just one language until the age of 7. Then never spoke that language again, cannot speak it now, and instead learned 2 new languages (simultaneously). He is fluent in both of those, and uses them both daily. So is he bilingual, monolingual, or "nonlingual"?

Tuonelan Joutsen · Post by **Tuonelan Joutsen** » Mon May 07, 2012 12:40 am

The main thing that distinguishes native speakers of a language from non-native speakers is the ability to make grammaticality judgments (or acceptability judgments): a native speaker can look at a totally novel sentence of their language and judge (e.g. tell a linguist) whether it conforms to their grammar or not. (The speaker's own grammar, that is; not any prescriptive rules set down by centuries-old grammars that aren't followed anymore, if they ever were.)

For instance, as an English speaker, I perceive a contrast between the sentences "Who did John say bought the book?" and "Who did John say that bought the book?". The first is a perfectly fine sentence of English; the second is not. I was never explicitly taught not to say the sentence with "that", but the intuition is strong. The so-called "that-trace effect" is a consequence of various other facts about the structure of English (and the other languages where it occurs; there are also many that don't have it).

The language I know best besides English is German, but I don't have the ability to make judgments about German sentences like a native speaker can. I've learned some things about grammaticality contrasts in German, but if I wanted to combine two linguistic structures and see how they interact, I might be able to guess the pattern from my knowledge of linguistics, but I would have to ask a native speaker to know for sure.

I would guess that someone who no longer speaks the first language they learned, but learned two others as a child, would have intuitions of grammaticality about both of the ones they speak now. (My exposure to German started when I was about 8, but no serious immersion ever took place, and I think you sort of need that to actually acquire a language. When I was really little -- 2 or 3 years old -- my parents got me some of those tapes that are supposed to teach kids French and come with books that have French on one page and English on the facing page. I listened to those tapes all the time, but I didn't have any kind of human connection with the language. So it didn't turn me bilingual, it turned me into a linguist!

)

Työelämä · Post by **Työelämä** » Mon May 07, 2012 7:41 am

Frankly, I’m surprised. I thought it was quite obvious why people who speak two languages are smarter than those who speak only one. It’s because they’ve had to work hard to become bilingual.
But even if complete fluency is never achieved, or the language is not put to use in the workplace or at school, there is no doubt that any effort to learn any language can only lead to greater understanding of another culture and challenge the mind to be more flexible.
It’s a great investment to nurture greater tolerance in an ever integrated and yet ever tense world. Make the Kids and even you the adults go Bilingual !

onkko · Post by **onkko** » Mon May 07, 2012 2:17 pm

offtopic but that study didnt say bilinguals are smarter, they perform better in certain areas but calling that smarter isnt what those studies tell.

onkko · Post by **onkko** » Mon May 07, 2012 2:19 pm

ajdias wrote:
onkko wrote:According to what?
To Google:
Percentage of world's children raised as bilingual speakers: 66 percent. Percentage of U.S. residents who are bilingual: 6.3 percent.

-- The Associated Press

Sources: Worldwatch Institute, Summer Institute of Linguistics
That's good enough for me, even accounting for some estimation error - you know, 1 billion more, 1 billion less

I really want to see hard study. If you bend things most of finns are trilingual and thats far from truth.

Pursuivant · Post by **Pursuivant** » Mon May 07, 2012 7:48 pm

I've been told its "functional bilingualism" if you see dreams in both languages... dunno, I don't think I dream in sounds... all I know is say my bookshelf has 99% of the books in 2 languages and I can enjoy both, any other language books there I "can read" but don't enjoy.

ajdias · Post by **ajdias** » Mon May 07, 2012 8:41 pm

onkko wrote:I really want to see hard study. If you bend things most of finns are trilingual and thats far from truth.

Let us know what you've found.

Rob A. · Post by **Rob A.** » Tue May 08, 2012 10:42 pm

Debates like this one always seem to raise more questions than provide answers..... I'm always kind of skeptical about people's "language claims".... Who decides who is bilingual..."self-reported"??? Some "government test"?? Ability to order kahvi ja pulla??? ...or the ability to read, say, Анна Каренина in the original with a native-like degree of comprehension???

Or if you can speak Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic....are you really quadralingual?? If these countries were united as they once were, would these not merely be dialects??

Finnish and Estonian???

Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French [...not to mention Catalan, Friuli, Sardinian, etc.]...dialects of Latin???....OK, I, in any event, would concede that French is sufficiently different.....

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