Cognitive Advantages of Bilingualism - Maria Polinsky

so it's very common to assume when people talk about language that everyone speaks a particular language and speaks it well and this assumption comes from large countries with large dominant languages like English in the United States or Russian and Russia or Chinese or Mandarin and China so you have a large country everyone's supposed to learn the large language and if they don't their problem but if you think more deeply and if you look at the history of human society it's in fact much more common for people to speak two or more languages and if we look at that from that angle we realize that monolingualism when someone speaks only one language and uses it most of the time is more of an aberration rather than the norm so in a way the way sociology and linguistics have positioned themselves is looking at the aberration in treating it as the norm and so obviously it's important to think about what the consequences of bilingualism and lately there's been a lot of new research which shows that bilingualism gives people significant cognitive advantages so let me give you two examples one has to do with a recent study which was done in Florida Florida of course where everybody goes when they turn 70 so there are a lot of really old people in Florida and a lot of these people live in assisted living or nursing homes there was a study in which they did in one of the nursing homes where they looked at about 800 subjects asking whether or not they grew up bilingual and they discovered that the likelihood of having Alzheimer's is five times less in people who grab bilingual than in monolinguals so that's not a bad result especially now that everyone is trying to live longer and they figured out how to deal with heart disease and cancer so we might all end up in the nursing home and it's not a bad thing not to have outside so the example comes from the other end of life and has to do with what's called wonder babies and this was a study which was done a few years ago in Trieste which is basically at the border of slovenian italy so there are a lot of Italians and there are a lot of Slovenians and there of course a lot of mixed marriages so what they did was they took three groups of babies all the babies were seven months old so there were a bunch of Italian speaking babies bunch of Slovenian speaking babies and a bunch of Italian Slovenian babies from mixed families they showed those babies various puppets and then they switched to the situation and typically when the seven months old baby is used to a particular setting and the situation switches it takes him a little while to regroup so it turned out that seven months old Italian and seven months old Slovenian babies would get used to the part appearing on the right and then when the puppy would appear on the left they would continue looking to the right as if nothing had changed whereas the bilingual babies very quickly would turn their head and notice that the puppet has changed its position so again an indication that all other factors being equal there was something that made those babies more advantageous and these are just a couple of examples indicating that people do really improve when they speak more than one language especially if that happens from birth or at least in the first five years of life doesn't mean that everyone has to drop everything in if you are 51 years old start learning the language that will help only marginally but if you were born in a situation where two or more languages are spoken or if there are languages that you were exposed to as a child that certainly gives you an advantage the question is why I'm going to give you one of the possible hypothesis which is very rapidly being explored in different fields or these days that is that the control of languages has to do with what's called executive control which is your portion of cognition that is responsible for attention and the distribution of tasks so let's say if you're driving a car you spend a lot of your energy and the Lord your memory resources into looking on the road and ignoring what's happening around so the reason we don't want to text when we're driving is that this will distract us from keeping attention on the road a lot of an energy spent on not paying attention to things which are not related to our driving likewise when you have two languages or more representing in your brain when you speak one a lot of your energy and a lot of your memory resources go into suppressing the other language which is constantly present in your cognition and precisely because you are so experienced as a bilingual or multilingual speakers for at suppressing the other languages in your representation your executive control is better and the way you exercise it way more than let's say monolingual speaker does and that leads to significant cognitive advantage obviously there are different shades of bilingualism multilingualism and so once we discover that there are cognitive advantages there all kinds of questions that people ask one of the questions is whether or not it's better to speak three languages than to at the present we don't see any significant advantage in the presence of three languages as opposed to two another question has to do with whether or not it's better to introduce two languages sequentially or simultaneously people have been long worried about raising bilingual children because the worry is that bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in each language than monolingual children and that's kind of obvious because they're you know 18 waking hours in the day and let's say nine hours you hear language X and the other nine hours you hear language Y so of course you'll hear half of the information that you'd hear if you were just a monolingual speaker so up till age five we do find that bilingual children have smaller vocabulary in each of those languages but eventually they catch up so I don't think that this would be a significant to worry because this is not something that is going to last and so it's important just keep doing that the argument for sequential bilingualism as opposed to simultaneous bilinguals are not terribly serious and it looks like simultaneous bilinguals are better at certain tasks compared to sequential bilinguals but sequential battles are better at other tasks and so where the jury is still out as to which of those two is better what matters is the amount of exposure and not the water in which the languages were introduced and then finally people often worry about the role of literacy and bilingualism and multilingualism saying that you know what's the point of learning a language which doesn't have literacy let's say if you're a speaker of Hmong living in the United States and there is a large home community in Minnesota the Huang's kind of looked down upon their language because they don't see what the use of it as there is no huge literature and English of course you've got everything from Shakespeare to Quentin Tarantino and you want to use all that but literacy is secondary to language and there are millions and millions of speakers who speak languages with no literacy or with just the oral tradition and they still have significant knowledge and significant cognitive advantages so the presence or absence of literacy in a particular language is not a deciding factor in determining whether or not you want to raise your child bilingual or monolingual the disadvantages have to do first with the smaller vocabularies which show up in the beginning and like I said that usually catches up around age five the other disadvantage may have to do with the unequal distribution of languages one language is significantly weaker than the other you will see that there will be some kind of a transfer or interference from the stronger language to the weaker language so these are probably the two main factors that people bring up one of the big issues in understanding vile ISM is what the input should be for bilingual or multilingual speakers for if a child grows up in the family where the mom speaks language accent the dad speaks language why should they all be speaking acts or should they'll be speaking why or should it be one parent one language until recently there had been one parent one language so if your mom speaks Chinese and your dad speaks English the mom should only speak English the dead should only speak Chinese that's a really difficult model to follow up on and it only happens in an ideal world so basically the notion that we've followed lately is that it's just good to have as much exposure to particular language as possible and then the question is of course whether or not there should be language x spoken in the family and language y spoken in the society and this is where again the importance is in the input the reason that we have a lot of minority languages whose speakers start losing them is that the societal pressures are much stronger than the pressures of the family and so if the family can just increase a lot of input by let's say taking a person to the country where this language is spoken is the main language this is the best there was a very nice study on Finnish spoken in the United States by Helena hamari who noted that people who grew up in the United States speaking Finnish in the family but did go to Finland every summer were much stronger in their Finnish than people who only learned finishing the family and were exposed to English so basically the crucial word is inpu T input and that's what matters I don't need to convince myself like bilingual is important but I think we still have a lot of work to do in the general public convincing people that bilingualism is the way of life and there are a lot of issues here some of them are economic issues because bilingual programs bilingual education costs money and when the money is tight it's always hard and it's also something that varies from country to country mmm living in a large country I'm very used to the model that everyone has to speak English and this is the way laughs and English is of course the language that everyone wants to learn if you go to smaller countries like Switzerland or the Czech Republic bilingual is more of the norm and so my hope is that both linguistic research and educational policies will lead to the whole world becoming one big Switzerland rather than the whole world becoming one big United States or Russia you

Channel: Serious Science

Views: 70,467

Keywords: science, lecture, Serious Science

Id: W-ml2dD4SIk

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2015