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Bilingual Kids Show More Creativity
An anonymous reader tips news of a study from researchers at the University of Strathclyde which found bilingual children to be significantly more successful at a set of tasks than children who spoke only one language. "The differences were linked to the mental alertness required to switch between languages, which could develop skills useful in other types of thinking." Lead researcher Fraser Lauchlan said, "Bilingualism is now largely seen as being beneficial to children but there remains a view that it can be confusing, and so potentially detrimental to them. Our study has found that it can have demonstrable benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively. We also assessed the children's vocabulary, not so much for their knowledge of words as their understanding of them. Again, there was a marked difference in the level of detail and richness in description from the bilingual pupils."
rocks!
Tomorrow is another day...
Alternatively, bilingual children tend to be raised by people with greater drive and skill in problem solving, notably immigrants.
Who the hell thinks this? I grew up in a bilingual household and then took Spanish in high school, so I'm semi-trilingual. Childhood is the best time to learn a new language since children can still hear the differences between phonemes that aren't present in the main society's language.
You dont even have to live in a multicultural community. Start early enough and the kid will learn the second language just as easy as they'll pick up on English
How does the disparity in performance among Hispanic kids factor into this study?
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Actually, I can speak, read and write in 7 languages
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Je ne sais pas que tipo de confusión ce puede causar.......
(It's a joke -- don't mod me down for using alternate languages...)
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
that doesn't mean learning multiple languages increases intelligence.
I'm sure diversity in doing things instead of single mindedness is nearly always valuable.
Lera Boroditsky's research has come up with results that challenge some basic assumptions in linguistics. One such finding is that rather than language simply expressing thought processes, it shapes mental models of the world.
Since much of our thinking is actually affected by language, and language structures vary sometimes greatly (e.g. Chinese vs English), integrating an additional language into a mind seems highly likely to expand general mental capacity. Perspective is perhaps an underrated element. I am no linguist, but as I understand, a language such as English suffers a lot of nouns. Since most 'things' are actually not nouns, but motions in space/time, a language centered more around the verb may offer advantages. I find Alfred Korzybski's E-Prime quite intriguing. I think one interesting example might be the Chinese word for "fist" -- which i think in Cantonese is something like (pinyin) quan? -- , a noun in English, but an action or verb in Chinese. Maybe I am going a bit far with this, but it would seem to me that any form of exercise and added pliability would offer more capacity for mental tasks. But of course, not in all matters, i.e. mathematics.
I remember taking introductory German as a teenager and thinking differently because of it. While it didn't have me asking random strangers for their papers or hording bratwursts, I did feel more capable and confident because of it. Though I suppose this may be true of any substantial exercise, whether linguistic or otherwise.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
And the results of this study are a surprise...why? Of course children who have the discipline, tenacity and motivation to learn and switch between two languages are going to be better at most things...language is a multifaceted mental effort, one of the highest degree...if they can learn and master two languages its should be a no-brainer they can do most other things better as well.
I think you're missing the point. In many, many parts of the world, people learn two or three languages before they even start school. In East Africa, you learn your parents' language and ki-Swahili; in Indonesia and Malaysia, it's parental language(s) plus Bahasa and sometimes Arabic; in the Philippines, it's parental language(s) plus Tagalog plus English. The list goes on. It's simply taken for granted. I don't think the study is saying that learning language makes you smarter per se; it's saying that certain kinds of problems are easier for children who use more than one language on a regular basis.
If I've read it right, this is on the level of stating that people who grow up in mountainous areas with few vehicles generally show greater leg strength across the board. It's not suggesting that there aren't stronger and weaker children within that sample. I personally know some functionally illiterate people who can speak 4-6 languages fluently. They're not special; they're just a product of the environment they grew up in.
... It is disappointing, however, to see how unimaginative unilingual people can sometimes be. Maybe it's perceptual bias on my part, but I feel that I encounter more zero-sum, black/white logic from unilingual people than from multilingual people.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Exercising the brain makes it work better.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...trying to brainwash us into teaching our kids languages other than American!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Who the hell thinks this?
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
I have two tri-lingual kids, with Chinese and Finnish spoken at home, and 'Mmerican English at school. I think the American school system is negating any advantage they may have had. I kid people! It's the Californinglish that's destroying their chances :)
Same with typing. If you take qwerty typists and teach them Dvorak, their qwerty typing speed decreases a bit.
But yeah, I'm bilingual, semi-trilingual as well, and the confusion is very minor. Most of the time you can "switch gears" between the languages without problem (cross-language homophones and the occasional grammatical equivalent can cause a little confusion). But the benefits (allows you to see things missing in the language which mono-linguists take for granted, forces you to recognize there's more than one way to think about things) far outweigh the drawbacks.
Seeing how the "same" word translate differently in another language helps to fix in your mind the differences between:
- capitol / capital
- principle / principal
- affect / effect
- its et al
- theirs et al
I could go on, but these silly mistakes mostly happen to speakers ignorant of their own native language. Bilingualism kills that ignorance.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Who the hell thinks this?
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first. Sometimes they are confused about who speaks what language. Many times one of their children has come up to me and started babbling in a language I don't understand. Since small children are basically psychopaths (don't know right from wrong) they can't tell who understands or not. Over the long term they catch up, but if you were trying bilingual children without *needing* to, or if both parents spoke only one language, it would be pretty easy to just say "it confuses the children" and give up. My own son is only 4 months so he isn't saying much of anything, but based on the experience of our friends, he will be a little slower than his single-language peers at first.
There is a pretty good argument in the US that you don't need more than one language. I can get in my car, drive 12 hours, stop for the night, drive for 12 hours the next day, stop for the night again and drive for 12 hours on a third day. I live in the middle of the country, but a 36 hour drive would only put me in California somewhere. The US is VAST and monolingual. There are English "dialects" but you can generally understand people without any problem. I know of no other country on the planet where this is the case except the US. If I lived as an expat (I'm trying to do this, but my company won't cooperate) I would try to learn the local language, but for now it would be a huge time sink for no reward.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The study is about kids who grow up in housholds where the parents speak different languages.
Not about kids who are taught a second language on purpose by a teacher. No discipline involved.
Writing as a Belgian and thus intimately familiar with language wars: Over here the people who argue against multilingual education are indeed most often the "monolingual zealot (typically of the borderline racist kind)" type. Since they don't want to be labeled as such, they will typically use the "it confuses the child" argument, ideally using a young child that uses two languages in a single sentence as evidence (as if uni-lingual young children never make grammar mistakes). The "it's confusing" claim has the additional benefit that it can be used to convince non-racists who don't know any better. Never mind that the whole argument has been scientifically disproved a ton of times. Never mind even that every single multilingual child/adult walking the place is a perfect example that no harm was done. (Well, of course from the point of view of the zealots, harm was done. But I refuse make them my to reference point.)
Linux user since early January 1992.
I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first.
Slower with respect to what? With what objective measure????? My daughter speaks English and Japanese (from her Mother) and understand Spanish (my language) when I talk to her, and can count in all three languages. She is only 3 and a half years old. I don't see any confusion or delay in her progress (and neither 3rd party observers, including my sister who is a speech therapist and whom I asked her to evaluate her just in case.)
My nephew speaks English and Spanish from a very early age. He simply picked it up, and he's been on and off in learning Arabic (his father's language). My other nephew only spoke English, but once he was taken on a trip to our country of origin for a few weeks, he was speaking Spanish, reading it completely shortly thereafter. I would say that immigrant children of low-income families are as slow as mono-lingual children of equally disposesed (sp?) families. And with immigrant families in general (and Hispanic in particular), the income/education gap is true. But language or the presence of multiple languages, that is a factor. At the most, you might be seeing correlation (which we all know does not imply causation.)
Sometimes they are confused about who speaks what language. Many times one of their children has come up to me and started babbling in a language I don't understand.
But that's not confusion from children. They are simply talking naturally. They are not confused on what they are saying, and they not know that you don't know their language is not a symptom of a learning or cognitive deficiency. My daughter babbles to me in Japanese a lot of times, and I need my wife to translate. But for the most part she speaks to me in English and in Japanese to her mother. At no point in time my daugther is confused or having a cognitive problem in expressing herself when she speaks Japanese to me. You are confusing issues here
Since small children are basically psychopaths (don't know right from wrong) they can't tell who understands or not.
No, they are not psychopaths. They have still underdeveloped cognitive skills. Two different things. Poor choice of terms for building an allegory.
Talking to you in a language that you do not understand is not a wrong, just as it is not a wrong for them to not know, for example, that something still exists even when it is no longer in their view (remember kids crying when they don't see mommy, because they think mommy doesn't exist anymore?)
Over the long term they catch up
Yep, in about a year or two at the most.
but if you were trying bilingual children without *needing* to
Who in his right mind nowadays can say that they children do not need to be bilingual, or at least have a minimum working knowledge of a 2nd language should they ever aspire to something?
or if both parents spoke only one language, it would be pretty easy to just say "it confuses the children" and give up.
Herein lies the gist of it, it is people who (in your own words), just say "it confuses the children", and give up. People who are more prone to give up on that will also give up on other topics they do not understand (math for example.). But it has nothing to do with a 2nd language confusing people (or parents). Some parents are just lazy, and others are simply rightfully overwhelmed (it is not easy being a parent, I KNOW.) But this argument has nothing to do with "children confusion."
My own son is only 4 months so he isn't saying much of anything, but based on the experience of our friends, he will be a little s
I'm one of the ignorant monolingual types so typical of the U.S.A. When I studied Francais at school, I noticed that I did some thinking in the language, and felt that it was speeding up my thought processes, much like a multi-threaded CPU. I thought if one could grok the subtle differences between word translations it could increase intuitive understanding of reality.
Is Dr. Lauchlan the first one to actually look into this?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Dutch are taught Dutch, French, German and English before graduating school. Norwegians learn Bokmaal, NyNorsk, English and an elective language, then they generally also understand Swedish and Danish nearly fluently. Swedes learn Swedish, English and usually a third as Danish learn Danish, English and a third. Both Swedes and Danes normally understand Bokmaal Norwegian. Fins learn Suomi, Swedish, English and often a fourth. I only mentioned a small percentage of the world, they're only about 50 million people altogether, but that's about 1% of the world's population.
That sounds pretty common. I'm am American and I can speak 2 languages fluently, a third not-so-fluently, can communicate in 5 other languages (order food, ask directions, etc...) and can read a total of 14 languages without much effort. I suck at language too... my hearing problems make it impossible for me to learn new sounds, but once you learn a few, the others aren't so hard (within the same families).
My kids... they learn new languages like it's just natural. That's because on a daily basis, they can be watching cartoons or playing video games in 4 different languages and then we watch educational videos on learning new languages together. I am really hoping I can get one of them to learn Mandarin at some point.