Does being bilingual make you

smarter?
By Miguel Angel Muñoz 
23 June 2014 - 10:46

 https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/does-
being-bilingual-make-you-smarter
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'Speaking more than one language fluently has some cognitive costs and many
benefits.' Photo © 
Quinn Dombrowski, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 and adapted from the original.
Language teacher and researcher Miguel Angel Muñoz explains the latest
research on how being bilingual affects your brain, ahead of a British Council
seminar in Cardiff on whether learning a foreign language makes you smarter.
You can watch the live-streamed seminar  on Tuesday, 3 June.

More than half the world's population uses two or more languages every day

It is hard to estimate the exact number of bilingual people in the world, as there is a lack
of reliable statistics . But in 2012, a Eurobarometer survey  established that 'just
over half of Europeans (54%)' are bilingual, and other studies  hypothesise that more
than half of the world’s population is bilingual.

So what about you? Are you bilingual? Or rather - how bilingual are you?
Being bilingual isn't black-and-white

To answer that question, first we need to establish what being bilingual means. Contrary
to what one might expect, a recent study shows that bilingualism is not a categorical
variable  (i.e., 'you are either bilingual or not'), but a multidimensional construct
composed of two linked parts. The first of these is language proficiency, and the second
is language use.

I, for example, am -- or used to be -- proficient in German, but I have not used my

German regularly for a very long time. Point number one: the more proficient you are in
a second language, and the more you use it in your daily life, the more bilingual you will
be.

Now that you know the extent to which you are bilingual, the next question is what the
advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual are. In this post, I will talk about the
cognitive benefits and costs that have been identified by scientific research. It turns out
that being bilingual has some costs, but many benefits.

What are the costs of being bilingual?

When I speak in English, my Spanish is also activated. Both languages are active in the
brain of a bilingual person when he or she speaks, and this incurs a processing cost, as
the brain needs to do two things at once. According to one study , this can mean that
'the verbal skills of bilinguals in each language are generally weaker than those for
monolingual speakers of each language'.

Bilingual people tend to have weaker verbal skills

Bilingual people tend to produce fewer words of any given semantic category than
people who only speak one language fluently. In other words, their individual
vocabularies in each language tend to be smaller than that of people who only speak
one of those languages.

Another study has shown that bilingual people also experience 'nearly twice as many'
tip-of-the-tongue moments (when you can't find the exact word you want to describe
something) than their monolingual peers. These cognitive costs don't just affect the
lexical level (i.e., vocabulary) but also the syntactic one  (i.e., grammar).

What are the benefits of being bilingual?

Don’t worry. There are also benefits to being bilingual, and they far outweigh the costs
mentioned above. There are three main cognitive benefits.

1. Bilingualism affects the development and efficiency  of the brain's multifactorial

'executive control system'.
The bilingual brain is used to handling two languages at the same time. This develops
skills for functions such as inhibition (a cognitive mechanism that discards irrelevant
stimuli), switching attention, and working memory.

These skills make up the brain's executive control system, which looks after high-level
thought, multi-tasking, and sustained attention. Because bilingual people are used to
switching between their two languages, they are also better at switching between tasks,
even if these tasks are nothing to do with language.

People who speak two languages have also been shown to have more efficient
monitoring systems. A 2009 study  showed that monolinguals and bilinguals respond
similarly when the brain's monitoring system is not taxed, but in conditions requiring
high monitoring demands, bilinguals were faster. Bilingual people
also outperform monolingual people in spatial working memory tasks.

2. Bilingualism has widespread effects  on the functional and structural properties of

various cortical and subcortical structures in the brain.

Our brains change and adapt as a result of experience. Studies have shown that people
who are multilingual have higher density of grey matter , and that older people who
are bilingual tend to have better-maintained white matter  in their brains.

So, does this make you smarter if you are bilingual? I’m afraid not. I don't know any
study that shows a link between bilingualism and such concepts as executive
intelligence, emotional intelligence or intelligence quotient.

3. Bilingualism promotes cognitive reserve in elderly people

Taking part in stimulating physical or mental activity can help maintain cognitive

function, and delay the onset of symptoms in people suffering from dementia. The onset
of dementia symptoms is significantly delayed - by as much as five years  - in patients
who are bilingual. The brains of bilingual patients with Alzheimer’s disease function
cognitively at the same level  of monolingual patients who have suffered less brain
degeneration.

What are the limitations to research into bilingualism?

There are some limitations to the research presented above. For example, the bilingual
advantage is not always found in young bilingual adults. Some people argue that this is
due to the fact that young adults are at the peak of their cognitive development, so the
positive effects of bilingualism aren't as noticeable. Scientists also agree  there's not
enough research yet into how and why the bilingual experience affects the brain's
processes in the way it does.

But we can certainly dispel some myths about being bilingual - such as the outdated
and disproven idea that growing up bilingual confuses and hinders cognitive
development.
On the contrary, being bilingual is a beneficial condition that one is never too old nor too
proficient to experience and develop.

Find more seminars for English language professionals  live-streamed from the

UK.