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The Debate Continues: Being Bilingual Doesn’t Improve Executive Function
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Being bilingual, of course, offers lots of advantages. You can speak with more people, and — depending on potential cultural differences — gain valuable additional perspectives.

For a long time, researchers have wanted to know: does being bilingual offer additional cognitive benefits? Can it, in a meaningful way, help us think differently, and think better?

Some researchers — including my grad-school professor Gigi Luk — have argued that it increases cognitive control.

This possibility has been studied, for instance, with immigrants who learn a second language in Head Start.

However, this claim has long provoked controversy.

In this recent study, using highly sophisticated statistical procedures, researchers found that being bilingual did not improve executive function for Turkish immigrants to Germany.

What Should Teachers Do?

I have, over the years, seen studies on this topic go back and forth.

For instance, the Head Start research cited above seems quite persuasive. In that study, all students increased self-control during their Head Start year; after all, they were getting older.

Crucially, the students who also became bilingual showed greater increases in self-control. The likely explanation? The cognitive control required to be bilingual helps with other kinds of self-control as well.

And yet, as seen in the study of Turkish immigrants, that conclusion just might not be plausible.

So, my suggestions:

First: if your school currently makes strong claims about the executive-function benefits of bilingualism, you should think strongly about acknowledging the controversy in this field. That claim does have support. It also faces lots of strong counter-evidence.

Second: use this study as a reminder to seek out contradictory findings before you make changes to your classroom.

That is: if you hear persuasive research about topic X, be sure to look for anti-X research before you start X-ing.

Third: somewhat glumly, I wonder if this question ever can be answered finally and persuasively. The category “executive function” is alarmingly nebulous. And, the reasons that people become bilingual vary dramatically.

Given so many kinds of variety, I increasingly doubt we’ll be sure of an answer here.

With that point in mind, I think we should highlight this important point: learning a second language has value even if doing so doesn’t produce additional executive function benefits.

When we learn new languages, we create new opportunities to meet and connect with a world full of people. That benefit alone makes all that hard work worth while.

A Bilingual Advantage in New Language Acquisition?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

According to this new study, bilinguals learn new languages faster than monolinguals.

To reach this conclusion, this research looked at brain wave signatures as participants learned an artificial language.

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(Understanding electroencephalogram research is always tricky. Don’t feel bad if you’re not totally clear on what a P600 might be.)

The short version is this. As they learned this new language, neural patterns for  bilinguals resembled native speaker patterns relatively quickly. Those patterns for the monolinguals developed more slowly.

Limitation to Bilingual Advantage Research

We can’t be sure that this finding extrapolates to the real world. After all, this particular artificial language has only 13 words in it–four nouns, two adjectives, two adverbs, and so forth.

However, the study does tentatively support a widely-believed conclusion: the hardest language to learn is the second…

(By the way: we’ve posted about the potential benefits and detriments of bilingual education several times in the last year. You can click on “bilingual education” in the tags list on the right to see other articles.)

Bilingual Preschoolers and Self-Control
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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If you can speak two or more languages, you’re likely to have some real advantages in life. For starters, you can talk easily with lots more people, and turn off the subtitles on more movies.

Are there cognitive benefits to bilingualism? That is, does being bilingual help you think better?

(more…)

Bilingual Advantage: Efficient Processing
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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Recently, I linked to a study suggesting potential downsides to bilingualism: in at least this one study, bilingual students were less successful with metacognition than monolingual students.

In that post, I noted that this one detriment doesn’t mean that bilinguals are “bad at thinking” in some broad way, or that bilingual education is necessarily a bad idea. Instead, that study was one interesting data point in a large and complex discussion.

Well, that discussion has gotten even larger and more complex. A research team at the University of Montreal has explored the neural mechanisms that help adult bilinguals focus on some information without being distracted by other kinds of information.

Neuroscience is always complicated, but the simple version is this: bilinguals use more efficient networks to maintain focus on a particular information stream.

In other words: we’ve got research showing both advantages (efficient attention processing) and disadvantages (reduced metacognition) to bilingualism. So, what should we do?

In the end, teachers and parents can draw on research to explore these questions, but we must put many conflicting pieces together to draw the wisest conclusions.

Research Morsel: a Potential Downside for Bilingualism?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

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Research into the benefits of bilingualism has gotten lots of attention in recent years. For example, some scholars argue that being bilingual protects our cognitive dexterity as we age.

However, a recent study suggests a potential downside for bilinguals. Folke et. al. find that, compared to their monolingual peers, young bilingual adults have a harder time with metacognitive processing — that is, analyzing their own cognitive performance.

If further research supports this finding, then teachers and scholars will have to add this potential short-term cognitive detriment to their calculus as they consider long-term cognitive benefits.

To be clear: this research does not show that being bilingual is cognitively bad, or that bilingual education is a bad idea. Instead, it offers one potentially interesting data point for a complex discussion — a discussion that must consider benefits, detriments, and many, many unknowns.