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Linguistic Dexterity: Bilingualism; Multilingualism; Language Learning

Schwadevivre

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Which doe raise the question about whether all children should be brought up bilingual.
Most young children are essentialists: They believe that human and animal characteristics are innate. That kind of reasoning can lead them to think that traits like native language and clothing preference are intrinsic rather than acquired.

But a new study from Concordia University suggests that certain bilingual kids are more likely to understand that it’s what one learns, rather than what one is born with, that makes up a person’s psychological attributes.

The study, forthcoming in Developmental Science, suggests that bilingualism in the preschool years can alter children's beliefs about the world around them. Contrary to their unilingual peers, many kids who have been exposed to a second language after age three believe that an individual’s traits arise from experience
It would also be interesting to see if the hearing children of deaf parents show similar flexibility.
 
Interesting. I wonder what the significance of introducing the second language after age three is? There must be any number of children being raised by parents who do not share a native tongue, a good proportion of whom can therefore be thought of as bilingual from birth. Or do they in turn just assume that two languages are intrinsic?

Either way, I favour your suggestion that it would be advantageous to all children to be brought up bilingual. I heard somewhere that knowing a second language well also appears to reduce the risk of dementia in later life.
 
I am bilingual, but was only exposed to my second language aged 9. My son is growing up with exposure to a second language, so I suppose I could carry out my own study on this.
I would like to see the full article, because as a Psychologist I have a professional interest in this. I am also a little puzzled regarding the whole premise, as Psychology itself can't agree on whether traits are due to nature or nurture, and what the relevant contribution of each might be.
So, is this really a study of an individual's perceptions of whether other people's traits are fixed or fluid, and how this has an implication on how the individual views and treats the other person?
On a different note, established research seems to suggest that bilingual children are more creative. In terms of reducing the risk of dementia later in life there also seems to be some research supporting this, then again there is also research that suggests that education seems to be a protective factor. We have to be careful though to not attribute cause and effect to any of this research as it is merely correlational, and there could be lots of extraneous variables regardiing why there is a relationship. So for instance, better educated = more neuronal connections = more redundancy before dementia becomes apparent?
 
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Not for the first time, I should have been clearer in my post - I believe there are other advantages to knowing a second language beyond reducing dementia risk (assuming it does, as m'learned colleague @Loquaciousness cautions) and the obvious ease of ordering your beverage of choice in the other country.

I take all the caveats about correlation - I suppose one potential counter would be whether those with a given level of knowledge in, say, mathematics show similarly reduced susceptibility.

A further potential complication: what about children with limited academic achievement who are from bilingual backgrounds?
 
Seriously, this might be replicated with the hearing children of people who use signing.

BTW will you be a shiny Ph.D or a dull PhuD?
 
I think you'll find that children of limited achievement from bilingual backgrounds are also in situations which subject them to discrimination and prejudice - they are "half-breeds," immigrants, of a stigmatized race, often growing up below the poverty line, in subcultures embedded in monolingual cultures that look down on a number of bilingual strengths (such as code-switching), etc.

There's also the question of who gets to define "achievement" in any given situation....
 
I think you'll find that children of limited achievement from bilingual backgrounds are also in situations which subject them to discrimination and prejudice - they are "half-breeds," immigrants, of a stigmatized race, often growing up below the poverty line, in subcultures embedded in monolingual cultures that look down on a number of bilingual strengths (such as code-switching), etc.

Yes, I wouldn't take issue with any of that (other than perhaps to add "many"), especially given your second paragraph, and I hadn't meant to pass any value judgements. I had simply been looking through the very narrow lens of trying to find groups as possible counters to the hypothesis about lowered dementia risk. As both you and Loquaciousness suggest, there are many more variables than my back-of-envelope jottings could encompass.

There's also the question of who gets to define "achievement" in any given situation....

Again, I quite agree. Both my children are unschooled, which my OH and I believe to be a very powerful educational philosophy, but to many people who are only familiar with the schooling paradigm, it just looks like letting them run wild :rolleyes:

Incidentally, a strong motivation behind us keeping the children out of school is evidence that suggests bilingual children (as our two are) tend to reject the "other" language when placed in formal educational settings, for reasons which bring us back towards PeniG's post :(
 
(Copied from The Octopus Thread)
I've long thought that human intelligence is connected to our manual dexterity, with our two opposable thumbed hands.

But if that's true, then octopi and squid, with their multiple prehensile arms, should be even more intelligent.

It's probably only the fact that they have to live in the sea that prevents them from being Top Species on Earth.
I've certainly thought that linguistic dexterity is related to handedness. It's noticeable that language learners can, after a certain amount of learning, use the target language to do everything they need, but don't use the language in a 'sophisticated' way, i.e. it sounds clunky to a native speaker. It's like doing familiar tasks with your non-dominant hand.
 
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I've certainly thought that linguistic dexterity is related to handedness. It's noticeable that language learners can, after a certain amount of learning, use the target language to do everything they need, but don't use the language in a 'sophisticated' way, i.e. it sounds clunky to a native speaker. It's like doing familiar tasks with your non-dominant hand.
That's a very interesting analogy, thank you. Food for thought.
 
(This and following posts moved here from The Octopus Thread)
I've certainly thought that linguistic dexterity is related to handedness. It's noticeable that language learners can, after a certain amount of learning, use the target language to do everything they need, but don't use the language in a 'sophisticated' way, i.e. it sounds clunky to a native speaker. It's like doing familiar tasks with your non-dominant hand.
Bi-Lingual people are generally not quite as quick and able in either language as a mono-lingual and unless the seocnd language is learnt young, the accent is generally not quite spot on. However this minor disadvantage are more than compensated for by improved attention, better concept formation, often better working memory and memory retrieval. Also, bilingual people on average take a little over three year longer than mono-linguals to develop Alzheimers.

It's a complete mystery really why we don't teach a language to a decent standard at schools and for those for whom English is their second language, there are clear advantages.
 
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Bi-Lingual people are generally not quite as quick and able in either language as a mono-lingual and unless the seocnd language is learnt young, the accent is generally not quite spot on. However this minor disadvantage are more than compensated for by improved attention, better concept formation, often better working memory and memory retrieval. Also, bilingual people on average take a little over three year longer than mono-linguals to develop Alzheimers.
How are you defining bi-lingual? I understand it to mean someone who has native or near-native fluency in two languages. I don't consider myself bilingual, but I do have a certain command of Russian (although @gellatly68's analogy rings very true to my ears, and doubtless to the poor Russians who have to suffer my mangling of their mother-tongue). I'd argue that to be truly bilingual an individual needs to have acquired both languages in that window of early childhood that is more usually connected with first language acquisition, and that is not true in my case: I started learning Russian at the age of 13.

My elder daughter, on the other hand, has grown up speaking both Russian and English. She is unquestionably stronger in English, as that is the language environment she has spent most time living in, but she does have - at least as far as I can tell - an instinctive grasp of Russian which I lack. I would say she is bilingual. (My younger daughter is not classically neurotypical, and interestingly she used to display great reluctance in speaking or even hearing Russian. That has eased slightly, but she has yet to display the same sort of comfort in either language as her elder sibling.) However, I realise that one instance does not prove a conjecture, and I am interested in the basis for your assertion that bilingual individuals tend to be weaker in both languages than a mono-lingual individual is in the one language they can wield.

Incidentally, I had an interpreting teacher who maintained that some people were alingual: they grew up in a bilingual household, but did not acquire either language to native fluency. With nothing further to go on, I assume he was basing this category on his experience of many cohorts of interpreting and translation students. Does that have any bearing on the discussion?

As I experience it, my brain seems to have two categories for language: "native" and "foreign". This has the interesting side-effect that when I try to speak French, my brain also categorises that as "foreign" and therefore offers Russian words to fill the gaps. Brain, if you're listening, it would be nice to have a slightly finer-grained set of categories...
 
I suspect that 'true' bilingualism is relatively rare, by which I mean that bilinguals tend to prefer one language over the other - just as ambidextrous people will still tend to use one hand more than the other.
Having said that, it's interesting to note that in bilingualism, certain tasks are preferred to be done in one language rather than the other - For example, you may talk in one language at home, but use a different one at work. It strikes me this is very much an example of relative dexterity. It would be interesting to put a bilingual person in an MRI or CAT scanner and give them different linguistic and manual tasks to do, just to see if the language/ hand control parts of the brain overlap.
 
Here's an old chestnut of a question - what language do multilingual people think in?

Or do we not think in any particular language at all? Unless we're actually composing text or speech 'in our heads' at the time, are we just really thinking in sounds, images, feelings, colours... or something else?

I know thoughts are really electrical impulses, but that's not quite what I mean...
 
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How are you defining bi-lingual? I understand it to mean someone who has native or near-native fluency in two languages. I don't consider myself bilingual, but I do have a certain command of Russian (although @gellatly68's analogy rings very true to my ears, and doubtless to the poor Russians who have to suffer my mangling of their mother-tongue). I'd argue that to be truly bilingual an individual needs to have acquired both languages in that window of early childhood that is more usually connected with first language acquisition, and that is not true in my case: I started learning Russian at the age of 13.
Fluent in two or more languages.

Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Luk, G. (2012). Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(4), 240-250.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322418/

It's one of the more readable papers, I'm supposed to have 'memorised' (never going to happen).
 
good old Bialystok - had occasion to quote him in the past as well.
Bet he knew bugger all about passive agressive octopi, though.
 
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