Multilingualism subjected to rigorous review

Having grown up overseas and then having lived and worked internationally in my adulthood, I have, all my life been washed by other languages. I lived in Venezuela as small child and understand that I had some proficiency in Spanish though it is long gone, evidenced only by a smattering of words.

By my best reckoning I have had formal instruction in five languages with varying degrees of proficiency attained: French, German, Swedish, Arabic and Latin. In my middle years as a child, I attended an international school in Stockholm, Sweden where, in any given year, there were children from 40-60 countries represented. While English was the school language, there was a babble from around the globe.

I always admired those among my peers with language proficiency. If I worked hard, I became somewhat proficient but it was never very fluent and always disappeared without continued use. Friends of mine, on the other hand, seemed to absorb language osmotically. One week they were new to the country and then, a couple of months later, they were speaking like a native. I had great admiration for that talent.

Circulating in the background over the years has always been the rumor/conjecture/hypothesis that speaking multiple languages was beneficial in more than utilitarian ways. That it increased empathy, allowed you better perspective, enhanced capabilities, that it postponed the effects of mental aging. I was never confident that my awkward stumbling through languages other than English ever counted towards these effects, but it always seemed reasonable that those effects might be real. I occasionally came across counter claims but dismissed it as just the normal background noise to any hypothesis.

Apparently, according to Debate Rages over Whether Speaking a Second Language Improves Cognition by Simon Makin, it is more than simply contested.

It seems that the attractive hypothesis has been subjected to more rigorous testing and the results call it into question. Makin provides what seems to be a balanced account.

The idea that learning to speak two languages is good for your brain has come to be widely accept as fact, particularly in popular media. Studies have shown that bilingual speakers of all ages outperform monolinguals on certain cognitive performance measures. Other studies show delays in the onset of dementia and some even claim enhanced intelligence.

But a handful of attempts to replicate some of these seminal findings have failed to confirm this “bilingual advantage.” The number of studies that have not found a tie between bilingualism and better cognition has risen dramatically over the past few years.

A heated debate over this issue now rages in the research community and has gained prominent attention recently with a series of articles in the journal Cortex. A paper by Kenneth Paap of San Francisco State University and colleagues kicked off the fireworks in August, arguing that the evidence now suggests either no bilingual advantage exists, or it only occurs under certain as yet undetermined circumstances. Twenty-one commentaries and a summary by Paap and colleagues followed in October.

The authors were reacting to the intense optimism about the benefits of bilingualism generated by a large number of studies published over the last decade or so. Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist at York University, Toronto, and her colleagues, produced much of the important early work that helped to dismiss the outdated idea that bilingualism could be detrimental to children's intellectual development. Later studies went further, finding that bilingual children actually perform better than monolinguals in tests of “executive functions” –processes that control thought and behavior and enable complex cognitive tasks like problem solving.

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Paap and colleagues identified several problems with this body of evidence. When researchers study groups in natural settings outside the laboratory, they can't control factors that may differ between groups, such as socioeconomics, immigrant status, and cultural differences. Attempts to match these factors among groups or account for them statistically are inevitably imperfect, leaving the possibility that differences in performance are due something other than language skills. An even thornier problem has to do with causality. Does being bilingual influence cognition, or does a person's cognitive ability affect the probability of acquiring multiple languages?

The researchers also collected the results of all tests comparing executive functions between bilinguals and monolinguals published since 2011, finding that 83 percent of them found no difference between the two groups. There was also a tendency for studies with positive results to have used smaller samples, whereas those using larger study populations were more likely to find no effect. Smaller sample sizes have a greater probability of producing a spurious result by chance.

Both these latter issues show up in a lot of other social sciences studies. Reality is different from the lab and claimed effects disappear, the larger and more random and representative become the sampled population.

Indisputably there is always some utilitarian value to a second language. I do think that it does broaden your perspective as well, particularly languages which are not somewhat related to your native tongue (Arabic and Latin, for example, rather than German and Swedish). As to the rest, empathy, executive control, postponed dementia - guess we have to wait and see. The truth is out there.