To What Extent Does Bilingualism Enhance Overall Cognitive Ability?

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Introduction

In today’s world, an estimated 43% – nearly half of the world is bilingual . Bilingualism is 1 defined as “being able to speak and understand two languages fluently” but overall, the 2 topic is much more complex than we might realize. The term bilingualism may be used to describe individuals or whole societies and it may be something which occurs naturally or with some instruction. There may be equal proficiency in both languages or one language of the two may be more dominant. These definitions and differences will be discussed in greater detail in the main body of the essay.

Bilingualism is beneficial in many ways as the world is progressing. There are many advantages if you are able to communicate with other people in other parts of the world, both socially and in terms of employment but psychologists have become interested in the idea that bilingualism may have other benefits such as conflict management, problem-solving and general cognitive ability.

This essay will examine the different types of bilingualism and consider the extent to which this ability may have a positive effect on overall cognitive development.

What is bilingualism?

Giving the definition of bilingualism (being able to speak or understand two languages fluently), you would think that’s it. Looking deeper into the different types of bilingualism it’s far more complex. It all starts when and how you learn the language. A language is a form in which we express ourselves through, it’s a combination of sounds which form words which then form sentences. Each culture/ country has its own language, in some countries of the world population is already bilingual or multilingual. Those countries had a foreign factor that affected their country and therefore speaks more languages. Some of their languages are dialects, a mixture of languages, which gives them a benefit towards multilingualism.

Different ways to learn a new language is can be through; compound bilingual, coordinate bilingual, subordinate bilingual, natural acquisition, guided acquisition, symmetric acquisition, and asymmetric acquisition. Becoming bilingual does not happen naturally, you either learn it unconditionally for eg, during your childhood or you learn it in your older years. Children are usually compound bilingual, meaning they learn two languages at the same time, but adults can it be too as they can learn two languages at the same time besides their first language. The children who are taught the language by their parents can be called natural acquisitions, it’s when a person learns a language without formal instructions. The opposite of this is guided acquisition, this is when you learn a language under instructions, usually perfomered in school, as the teacher teaches then the second language. When bilingual people use their mother tongue and second language daily they are coordinate bilingual. Usually, the mother tongue dominates all of the other languages, which happens on a daily basis, this happens to subordinate bilingual people. Learning new languages can be learned through different skills if the person only learned several languages through the same skill it is called symmetric acquisition. Only when one language dominates the other it is called an asymmetric acquisition

Cognitive abilities

The cognitive ability is the ability to process what we hear and learn into our brains. Neuroplasticity is used in this as it creates new pathways for us to use as we learn something new. Therefore out cognitive ability will increase because those pathways are used more often and get stronger. Looking at the biological side of bilingualism, the left hemisphere of the brain controls language and speech. During a dilemma, a bilingual person has the advantage of thinking the other language, and according to a study they think of more rational decisions. This is as a result of that some emotional weight will be lost in certain words, but it can also be because they see the dilemma from another cultural perspective. Looking at this from the biological approach it can also be the cause that it can be processed through a different neural channel.

Biological approach

Looking at the biological approach psychologists can look through a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) which parts of the brain function when we use another language. FMRI detects any change in blood flow in the brain, if the blood flow is higher in a certain area it will light up and can be observed because that part of the brain will be in use and will, therefore, show more activity in that region. The grey matter is found in the outer part of the brain which controls the sensory, inhibitory, muscle control, sensory perception and many more regions such as listening, hearing, speech and more. Another study conducted by the georgetown university medical center whose aim was to see whether bilingual people have more gray matter than monolingual people. They referred back to the study Maguire et al (2002) who saw that the taxi drivers had larger hippocampus than regular people. It showed that if people were trained on a specific area, that that part of the brain would grow because of the practice and would therefore also have more gray matter and a bigger hippocampus.

There has been a study done using fMRI, where participants speaking English and Spanish had to perform tasks where they were forced to alternate between their two languages. The fMRI scan showed that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) showed an increase in activation when the participants had to name pictures in Spanish and English. The DLPFC is a region in the frontal lobe, which is associated with working memory, attention, and inhibition. Not only was the DLPFC affected but also the left-IFG (left inferior frontal gyrus) is affected, this part of the brain is the language production center, it controls the linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive control. This shows that in the brain of a bilingual there are more areas affected when switching languages.

Advantages

A study by Victoria Marian and Anthony Shook (2012) Bilingual people have something called “language co-activation” this is when they are using one language, and that the other is active at the same time. Although language co-activation has its weaknesses. There was a study done where a bilingual perso (Russian-English) had to pick up a marker out of all the objects lying in front of him. They tracked his eye-movement and saw that the person kept staring at the stamp instead of the marker, this is because marker in Russian is “marka”. They concluded that language co-activation can lead to difficulties. As both languages are in use at the same time and can lead to misunderstanding and misinterpreting some words. Another difficulty is when a bilingual person is unable to find the right words to speak, although they know the definition, this is called tip-of-the-tongue states

There is a famous experiment called the Stroop test, which is when participants get to see a list of colored words, with a different color name for eg. the word “green” is the color blue and the word “yellow” is in the color red. Participants had to say the color of the word out loud instead of reading the word. They found out that bilingual people are far more advanced inhibitory control, which means they can ignore irrelevant information better than monolinguals. In this experiment, the bilingual people used their inhibitory control more as they can ignore the word and focus on the color.

Not only can the bilingual person access several languages but they can also manage the access of the languages at any time. This is called the control mechanism, they use this mechanism when they speak and listen. It is an important skill as they have to control which language they have to access when listening or understanding the given information. This skill can change the brain regions that are affected by this mechanism. Being bilingual has also its advantages for elderly people, for example, who can suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. In hospital records in Toronto, they found that bilingual patients suffered from dementia four years later than their monologue patients who grew up together. Also in Italy, they saw the same pattern, bilingual patients with Alzheimer’s disease had stronger neural connections than the patients who only spoke one language.

After surviving a stroke a monolingual person can be damaged in the brain and their cognitive ability can be affected. After research done in India with 600 stroke survivors, they concluded that 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to 19.6% of the monolinguals. This can be due to the large contrast of neurological pathways in a bilingual brain compared to the monolingual brain.

A neurological pathway is a way the signal from one region of the nervous system travels to another region of the nervous system, this happened through synapses and axons.

Emotions

Earlier in my essay, I talked about how some words can lose their meaning and value in another language, and how other words have far more meaning in the other language. You can say they have two different ‘minds’/ personalities, due to the value of words, because the language has their own thought they also have their own personality and therefore also their own behavior. Deawle and Pavlenko (2008) conducted an online study on the emotions on bilingual people. They asked their participants; “Do you feel like a different person sometimes when you use your different languages?”. They asked this question because in their past they would move to countries and found that their bilingual students could switch between language easily, but they also observed that their behavior changed as the language switch also change. In the results of their online study, 65% of their participants agreed to the statement.

Other researchers have also found that participants change behavior when alternating languages. Ervin (1964) has also researched this with her students, but she used a Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) with French and English. Her results showed that bilinguals use different themes when answering the TAT depending on which language they had to do the test. In her results, bilinguals used more verbal aggression towards their other participants in French stories than in English stories.

Cultural approach

In some countries it is common to be multilingual, this is because their native is a mixture of several languages. For example, Maroccan is a mixture of French, Spanish and Arabic and is therefore full of foreign words, so if you speak that language you already have the advantage of becoming multilingual. It also depends on which country you live in if the country has open borders you will meet and be influenced by other languages and cultures. For example, Switzerland has open borders and a lot of its citizens are multilingual and speak; German, Italian, French, Romansh, and English. This could be due to World War 2 that occurred and all the countries were mixed.

Nowadays due to other wars in countries their citizens are fleeing to other countries, causing cultural clashes, and an increase in immigration rates. This graph shows the percentages of the population for each country, the bars are divided into % born in other European member states (dark blue) and into % born in non- Member countries (light blue). It can be seen for most European countries, more than half of their population are non-Member countries of the EU. This shows that the countries are mixing with each other causing more cultures to clash which means languages will too. This might cause for new languages to be created, and the countries their citizens to be multilingual.

Disadvantages

The most common disadvantage is that bilingual people tend to mix their languages while speaking. They do this when they lack vocabulary in one language, they will then use the other language to fill in the words they don’t know. This leads to becoming a subordinate person when the mother tongue dominates the other language. Having the mother tongue dominate the other language can also lead to losing the 2nd language as you don’t practice it as much, and therefore lose the vocabulary. Another type of bilingualism is being receptively bilingual, it means that you can understand a language but not able to speak it. This happens when you are not exposed to a language as often and thus stay on the same level of vocabulary and eventually will lose the language as it is not practiced as often.

A study done by Folke t, et al did a test to study bilingualism, he believed that bilinguals assess their own performance worse than monolingual people do. They did this test by evaluating their metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to think about your thinking, and have thoughts about thoughts. It is used in everyday life to make decisions and see what the outcomes would be if you made that decision. The participants in this study were shown two circles with dots in it. They had to determine which circle had more dots, sometimes it would be obvious but other times harder as the difference would be only one dot. After choosing the circle they had to determine how confident they were in their decision on a scale from not being confident to be confident. The results showed that both monolinguals and bilinguals chose the right circle when choosing the majority of dots, however, it was shown that the monolinguals were better at discriminating when they were right or wrong. It could, therefore, be concluded that bilinguals had less insight into their performance than monolinguals. These results were not expected as bilingual people are usually faster and accurate in performing cognitive tasks, and can, therefore, be seen as a disadvantage.

Conclusion

Bilingualism is a complex topic, which brings a lot of advantages to the cognitive ability. It has been shown that bilingual people are better in decsion making, problem solving, rational thinking and it has also shown that eldery people suffer from dementia or alzheimers on a later age than an average person. Altough bilingualism has also shown that it can affect our personality as some words lose emotion due to lack of vocabulary or because on language dominates the other. It has also shown that a bilingual person has less insight on their performance than a monolingual person. Referring back to my research question “To what extent does bilingualism enhacne overall cognitive ability?”, bilingualism does enhance overall cognitive both positive and negative.

Reference

http://theconversation.com/there-are-also-drawbacks-to-being-bilingual-56726 – Look at these disadvantages
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests- Start off with reading this one.
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests- Gray matter
https://blog.elevateapp.com › how-bilingualism-affects-your-brain-and-body…- Gray matter in bilingual people.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/language – language definition
https://www.smart-words.org/bilingualism.html
http://ilanguages.org/bilingual.php
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284179849_Multilingualism_and_Emotions –
multilinguals and emotion
https://labclab.psychology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1167/2015/04/Language3.pdf – study
https://languagecoursesguide.com/are-there-any-disadvantages-to-being-bilingual/- Disadvantages of being bilingual.- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3560439/Being-bilingual-bad-brain-Scientists-say-damage-person-s-ability-judge-performance.html- BAD side of bilingualism, study Falke et al.
http://theconversation.com/there-are-also-drawbacks-to-being-bilingual-56726
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests
https://www.sciencealert.com/bilingual-brains-have-higher-volume-of-grey-matter-study-suggests
https://blog.elevateapp.com/how-bilingualism-affects-your-brain-and-body-59e669d14372
https://blog.elevateapp.com/how-bilingualism-affects-your-brain-and-body-59e669d14372
https://www.britannica.com/topic/language
https://www.smart-words.org/bilingualism.html
http://ilanguages.org/bilingual.php
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284179849_Multilingualism_and_Emotions
https://labclab.psychology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1167/2015/04/Language3.pdf
https://labclab.psychology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1167/2015/04/Language3.pdf
https://languagecoursesguide.com/are-there-any-disadvantages-to-being-bilingual/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3560439/Being-bilingual-bad-brain-Scientists-say-damage-person-s-ability-judge-performance.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3560439/Being-bilingual-bad-brain-Scientists-say-damage-person-s-ability-judge-performance.html

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