Aguam, Amir-Hazsann B.

On the Issue of the Effects of Bilingualism on Language Development of Children

The words we have at our disposal affect what we see—and the more words there are, the better
our perception. Ludwig Wittgenstein said this in his essay "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
from 1922: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Speaking another
language teaches us to view the world more broadly.

That assumption is shared by many modern language researchers. Speaking different languages
not only improves our ability to communicate, but it may also have specific benefits for the brain
development. A multilingual infant, according to the hypothesis, develops improved executive
control, or the capacity to efficiently regulate what are referred to as higher cognitive processes,
such as problem-solving, memory, and cognition. She gains the ability to suppress some
responses more effectively and encourage others, and she develops a more adaptable and nimble
mind overall. It is a phenomenon known as the multilingual advantage.

Researchers truly believed that bilingualism put a child at a disadvantage and reduced her I.Q for
the first part of the 20th century. also verbal growth. However, recent research to the contrary—
much of it based on the meticulous work of psychologist Ellen Bialystok—has cast doubt on the
idea of a bilingual advantage. This research has appeared to be both comprehensive and
compelling. Bilingual speakers appear to have an advantage in a variety of tasks, including those
requiring working memory. Bialystok demonstrated that bilinguals did exhibit improved
executive control in a 2012 review of the research, a trait that has been connected, among other
things, to better academic performance. Furthermore, bilinguals frequently perform better than
monolinguals when it comes to skills like sustained attention and effective task switching. The
obvious conclusion is that if given the option, you should encourage your child to learn multiple
languages. Indeed, studies on "Creativity and Bilingualism," "Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual
Five-Year-Olds," "A Bilingual Advantage in Task-Switching," "Bilingualism Reduces Native-
Language Interference During Novel-Word Learning," and "Good Language-Switchers Are
Good Task-Switchers"—as well as the ensuing books with provocative titles like "The Bilingual
Edge" and "Bilingual is Better."

Angela de Bruin began speaking two languages at the age of eleven. De Bruin was raised
speaking Dutch at home and immersed herself in English at school. She was born in the
Netherlands' small town of Nijmegen in the 1980s. She got captivated by bilinguals and read
voraciously about the claimed cognitive benefits that come from being able to speak more than
one language. She studied neurology and languages in college. De Bruin also enrolled in the
psychology doctoral program at the University of Edinburgh in 2012 to continue his research on
the relationship between bilingualism and cognition.

She entered the program with the full expectation of learning how much of her multilingual brain
was suited for success. De Bruin recently informed me, "I received the feeling that there's a fairly
powerful influence of bilingualism on executive function. She then conducted her first
investigation. Typically, a task where participants must ignore certain stimuli while selectively
focusing on others is used to assess an individual's executive function. For instance, in the often
used Simon task, images (typically arrows) are presented to you on either the left or the right side
of a screen. If you see an arrow pointing to the right, press the key on the right. The arrow's
direction, rather than its location on the screen, is what matters. It doesn't matter where it
appears. On trials with congruent arrows—when the right-pointing arrow actually appears on the
right, and vice versa—people typically react more quickly. When the left arrow appears on the
right and the right arrow appears on the left in the incongruent trials, bilinguals are supposed to
do better.

However, when de Bruin examined the data, the advantage wasn't present in three of the four
tasks that tested inhibitory control, including the Simon task. Both monolingual and multilingual
students had given the same results. We reasoned that the body of literature might not provide a
complete and trustworthy picture of this area, she added. She therefore made the choice to run
more tests on it.

De Bruin methodically went through the conference abstracts from 156 conferences that dealt
with bilingualism and executive control between 1999 and 2012. The justification was simple:
conferences are venues for researchers to showcase work in progress. They provide updates on
the investigations they are conducting, as well as preliminary findings and ideas. If there were a
systematic prejudice in the field towards presenting negative results, or data that demonstrate no
benefits of bilingualism, then there ought to be much more findings of that nature presented at
conferences than are actually published.

De Bruin discovered exactly that. About half of the results presented at conferences supported
the bilingual advantage on specific tasks completely or partially, while the other half either
partially or completely refuted it. However, the split was clearly different when it came to the
publications that were published after the initial presentation. Compared to only 29% of studies
that found either no difference or a monolingual edge, 68% of studies that showed a bilingual
advantage were published in a scientific journal. Our analysis, according to de Bruin, "shows that
there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and
media) believing that the favorable impact of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is
strong and uncontested."

De Bruin doesn't contest the idea that speaking two languages has its benefits; in fact, some of
the research she looked at did demonstrate a benefit. The benefit, however, is neither universal or
extensive as sometimes described. De Bruin and her advisor conducted additional studies after
finishing their meta-analysis in an effort to determine the boundaries of the bilingual advantage
and what the true advantage might entail. These studies have just been submitted for publication.
They studied three distinct groups in order to look for a potential boost (English monolinguals,
active English-Gaelic bilinguals who spoke Gaelic at home, and passive English-Gaelic
bilinguals who no longer used Gaelic regularly). Each group completed four exercises: the
Simon task, a task of everyday attention (you hear different tones and must count how many low
ones there are while filtering out the high ones), the Tower of London (you arrange discs on a
series of sticks to match a picture of the finished tower), and a straightforward task-switching
paradigm, (you see circles and squares that are either red or blue and must pay attention to either
one color or one square) depending on the part of the trial.

There was no difference between the groups in the first three tasks, they discovered. On the final
test, they believed they had finally seen a benefit: on the switch trials, which were the tests
conducted immediately after switching from shape to color or color to form, bilinguals—both
active and passive—appeared to be faster. But after further investigation, the researchers
discovered that the issue wasn't so much switching more quickly as it was being slower at the
non-switch trials, where shape followed shape and color followed color.

Does that imply that a multilingual advantage doesn't exist? No. It is merely one study. However,
it supports the claim that the benefits of being multilingual are sometimes exaggerated. De Bruin
says that there is "absolutely not no advantage to being multilingual." Although many
researchers have defined it as a phenomenon that helps kids learn to transition between tasks and,
more broadly, improves their executive-control functions, the benefit may not be what they
think. The true edge, according to de Bruin, might appear much later and in a way that has little
to do with task switching and executive control; it might, she claims, be the consequence of
straightforward learning.

A general benefit that seems to benefit the aging brain is one of the areas where the bilingual
advantage seems to be most durable. It has nothing to do with a specific skill or task. Adults who
speak numerous languages appear to be much better able to fend off dementia than monolinguals
do. When Bialystok reviewed the records for a group of senior citizens who had been referred to
a Toronto clinic with memory or other cognitive complaints, she discovered that among those
who eventually developed dementia, the lifelong bilinguals displayed symptoms more than four
years later than the monolinguals. She and her colleagues discovered that bilinguals were
diagnosed 4.3 years later than monolinguals were in a subsequent study, this time with a
different group of patients who had developed Alzheimer's. This finding held true regardless of
cognitive level, prior occupation, or education. In other words, bilingualism appears to have a
protective impact against cognitive deterioration. That would be in line with a tale of learning, as
we are aware that one of the best ways to stave off dementia is to remain mentally sharp into old
age. Crossword puzzles became popular as a result. When the brain continues to learn, as it does
for those who can retain more than one language, it has the capacity to continue functioning at a
higher level.

That alone should be motivation enough to pick up a second, third, fourth, or fifth language—
and to continue learning them as long as you can. It's possible that the bilingual advantage
doesn't actually take the form that academics now believe it to. On a fundamental level, however,
the true advantages of bilingualism may be substantially more significant.