Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

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.)

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.

~~

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...

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

Might not afford you IQ points but it does afford you diplomacy points.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Which is perfectly valid english.

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

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...

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Yes

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".)

Multilingualism is an enabler.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Paying better salaries to working people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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).

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