
The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism - Thevet
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-battle-over-bilingualism/462114/?single_page=true
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dwaltrip
Another example of the reproducibility problem in psych studies. I really
think every study should be registered ahead of time. Negative and mixed
results are just as important.

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anu7df
OK. So there is no executive function advantage. But so far no one has seen a
disadvantage either. Right? Since no one would argue that knowing an extra
language is not useful, I wonder why this "bitterness" matters.

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stonemetal
>Since no one would argue that knowing an extra language is not useful,

Why would no one argue that? If I am a person from Kansas I am never going to
run into anyone who doesn't speak English. Where is the usefulness in learning
any other language?

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SyneRyder
I have a friend in Kansas who runs a store and is learning some Spanish. It
seems to be helpful with communicating with some of her customers.

It's been a few years since I last visited the US, but I remember being
surprised at the number of Spanish billboards I saw and stores with signs
saying "Se habla Español" across the states I visited.

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cableshaft
Spanish is becoming more and more prevalent in the US. There are some places
where speaking English is in the minority, especially in the Southwest.

I don't have a problem with it, except I took French and Japanese in school,
not Spanish, so I only recognize a few dozen of the most common Spanish words
and phrases.

And I can't keep up the language learning habit as an adult, as my Duolingo
profile will attest.

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iolothebard
Being bilingual helped me understand English grammar in a way I wouldn't have
otherwise. It also helped my writing skills immensely (IMO). Taking college
junior/senior level French literature classes was extraordinarily difficult
but rewarding. I did more work for my one French class than I did for five
junior/senior level business classes (Finance/Accounting/MIS). It's why I
eventually stopped, that and I realized I don't like evaluating literature in
English, much less French (they didn't have business language classes at my
Uni in the 1990s).

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mitchtbaum
Sadly, this article seems like a twisted joke. Nearly every single non-"modern
world" human with working legs speaks\spoke multiple languages, since in every
direction you can find another potentially highly varied society living there.
Primates have immense curiosity, and we generally like to socialize, even
beyond our own familiar communities (innately at least). This inherently puts
us among diverse environments, speakers, and interesting cultures (barring any
violent opposition to free movement).

What would language skills have anything to do with this non-existent
"executive system" anyway? (tfa mentions someone's guess about picking which
language to use in any given moment.. something I've only ever seen novices
and newcomers struggle with briefly, and only in conversation, not at all with
internal dialogue.) I only resort to language when I need high level
processing; and then having many angles of analysis can help enormously. When
I need to focus on something, I do it as I envisioned or practiced and with
kinaesthetic feedback (what other way is there?); language and other
analytical tools inherently go another direction than working with my material
environment. Fundamentally, these psychologists' messy model of language's
relationship to localized brain functions in top-down systems falls flat on
its face with this "executive function" concept mixing focus and inhibitory
control with (yet another overly broad concept) "problem solving", which they
then hold up as a sacrificial cost to something great.

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junto
I think there is an elephant in the room here. There is no easy way to have a
control subject.

Each person they test has a unique set of abilities and intelligence level.

My children are bilingual, and I know many other families that have children
who are being brought up in a bilingual environment.

I have an example of a bilingual child that didn't say anything almost at all
until they were 2.5 years old. My daughter has language skills that are
advanced for her age in comparison to her monolingual peers of the same age.
But she is just bright (parental bias I know). My younger son appears to be
improving even faster, but then he has a bilingual older sibling, so that
isn't a surprise.

The point is that it all depends on the person, as to how well they can adapt
to a bilingual upbringing. They are so many factors involved, that it becomes
impossible to categorically compare one person against another. Apples to
oranges, every single time.

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geomark
My son is growing up bilingual. It's natural since mother and father have
different first languages. I've been amazed since age 4 how easily he switches
between the two languages. I'll be talking to him in English and he will turn
to his mother and repeat the whole conversation in his other language without
missing a beat. He is also picking up Mandarin from watching videos on
YouTube.

I have no way of knowing if his "executive function" (ok, I'll go with that
term) is better because of it. But learning to speak more than one language
appears to be very easy for kids.

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iolothebard
From my understanding it's not the learning that's easier, it's the fact that
the brain tunes itself to the local languages by a certain (early) age. I'd
love to learn tonal languages but I have an extraordinarily hard time with
them (Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese). I've learned French, German,
Italian and Spanish with very little difficulty.

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geomark
Same for me with tonal language. At first I couldn't even hear the tones when
given examples of 3 Thai words with the same spelling but different tones and
hence different meanings. Eventually I got it and do pretty well now.

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_fizz_buzz_
This seems like an interesting study also. Bilingual skills enhance stroke
recovery, study finds: [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-
fife-3487...](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-
fife-34879608)

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tokenadult
I especially like the comment that picks up the information from the article
that psychological experiments in general (one might say science studies in
general) have to be reviewed for reproducibility. The article cites some good
sources on that issue. "But ultimately, this isn’t about whether it’s better
to know more languages or not. It’s about how science is done, and what counts
as decent evidence. It’s about the role of outsiders, and whether they’re
best-placed to see through the biases that permeate a field, or incapable of
judging it on technical grounds. And it’s about how researchers negotiate
disagreements of opinion."

For bilingualism as such, I'll mention that my list of languages learned as
second languages (I'm a native speaker of General American English who grew up
in the United States) is on my Hacker News user profile. My wife (from Taiwan)
and I were quite consistent about bringing up our oldest son (born in the
United States, brought up partly in Taiwan) as a bilingual native speaker of
Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) and English. Some of my younger children
are less completely bilingual, but all are comfortable with the project of
studying other modern languages. Taiwan's history since World War II is quite
interesting, because after the Republic of China Nationalist Party of China
(KMT) regime regained control of Taiwan at the end of the war, the school
policy was that school lessons all had to be taught in Mandarin. But the local
people in Taiwan mostly spoke Taiwanese (my wife's native language) or Hakka,
cognate but not mutually intelligible Sinitic languages. So the whole postwar
generation went to school, from first grade on, entirely in a foreign
language. My wife grew up speaking Taiwanese at home and Mandarin at school
(pupils were fined if they spoke the wrong language at school) and she now
habitually speaks to her older siblings in Mandarin, even though her whole
family in that generation are native speakers of Taiwanese. Some of our nieces
in Taiwan, essentially all from Taiwanese or half-Taiwanese families, are more
proficient in Mandarin than in Taiwanese. The KMT regime succeeded in
switching the majority language in Taiwan (also through control of radio
broadcasting and movie production in the days of the former dictatorship) and
the school pupils learned a lot even when Taiwan was dirt poor despite going
to school in a foreign language. And the level of knowledge of English over
there is pretty high too--my wife began study of English as a compulsory
school lesson at the beginning of junior high, and I think English is now a
primary school subject. So bilingualism is perfectly doable, if a country puts
its mind to bilingualism. Even language change is possible in just two
generations.

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khaannn
Being bilingual is just another proxy for a middle class or higher upbringing.

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koolba
> Being bilingual is just another proxy for a middle class or higher
> upbringing.

... or you could be raised by immigrants who continue to speak their mother
tongue at home while the children learn English (or whatever else is the
primary language) via TV/School/Public. There's nothing higher upbringing
about retaining your parents' culture. If anything, it's more associated with
lower class families.

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khaannn
Amongst immigrant families, yes. It's different with groups that have been
here several generations.

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adrusi
...but if you're going to say that selecting for bilingualism is actually
selecting for affluence, you can't ignore a huge population that is bilingual
and not affluent.

