Does Being Bilingual Really Make You ‘Smarter’?
According to a quick Google search, around 43% of the global population is bilingual. This means around 3.5 billion people today can speak at least 2 languages to a level of high proficiency. Due to bilingualism being such a prominent feature in so many people’s lives, it is no wonder that questions like whether bilingualism delays dementia, helps you learn other languages or causes language or speech delay arise. However, today we’re here to tackle the most asked question of all: Does being bilingual make you smarter?
The short answer to this question is no. Bilingualism does not make you smarter in the sense that it won’t raise your IQ or unlock profound intelligence just because you speak a different language, but it does aid many neurological processes and can provide many benefits. For example, bilingualism aids multitasking, focusing, being more adaptable, decreasing cognitive decline and even helps decision making, which are all things I will discuss in this article.
However, firstly, we need to define what bilingualism actually is before we get into all of this.
What is Bilingualism?
The dictionary defines bilingualism as the “fluency in or use of two languages”, however, it is a much more nuanced term than that. Albert Costa, a leading researcher who specialised in Speech Production and Bilingualism, said that “Defining bilingualism is like trying to hit a moving target. By this I mean that traditional definitions are either so broad that they are not useful, or so narrow that they leave out many cases of people who use two languages.”
Nevertheless, for ease of understanding and simplicity of explanation, I will keep referring to bilingualism through the definition of the ability to speak in two languages fluently or to a conversational degree, because many neurological differences arise only when proficiency of the foreign/second language is high enough.
With the definition of bilingualism out of the way, let’s go on to explore four fascinating factors that bilingualism aids with!
Adapting to Change With Ease:
One really interesting ‘benefit’ of being bilingual that I found out was the strength of adapting to environments and another person’s viewpoints better. Often, people have this ‘egocentric bias’ where one is unable to put themselves in another person’s shoes, not sympathetically or compassionately, but in the way that one will assume the person they are communicating with has the same context and information as them, even when they don’t. For example, in a foreign country, you ask a local for directions, and they tell you “Turn left here, then right, walk straight, pass the sign, turn right, and you’ll arrive!” These instructions make perfect sense to the local since they have a mental image and context of the neighbourhood, but your mind lacks this context, leaving you even more confused than before.
Bilingualism seems to help remove this ‘egocentric bias’ so that we are able to communicate and help others more easily and swiftly. In Albert Costa’s research, bilinguals seem to develop the ‘theory of mind’ more easily and much earlier than monolinguals. The ‘theory of mind’ is the ability to understand that others have their own mental state, beliefs and emotions that differ from our own. This allows us to interpret and navigate social interactions and situations much quicker and is a really great trait to have, especially when meeting new people or having to explain something to someone.
So, if you’re bilingual, you could technically brag to your monolingual friends that you’re better at understanding other people and explaining things to them than they are!
Focus, Logic and Multitasking:
Many tasks that require the removal of external distractions, like focusing on mentally demanding tasks, logic and mental puzzles, as well as even multi-tasking, are enhanced by the ability of bilingualism, which is so interesting.
Being bilingual strengthens the executive function in the brain, which is the command system that directs the attention processes we use for planning, solving problems and performing other mentally demanding tasks. This is because unconsciously, bilinguals have to exercise a series of control mechanisms in the brain to allow fluent speech in only one specific/desired language to avoid jumbling sentences in both languages together. These inhibitory mechanisms are the same ones that are used to help us reduce distractions when doing a task, which means that if you’re bilingual, focusing on a task will be far easier because the mechanisms are already exercised in day-to-day communication.
This ability that bilinguals have to switch between languages quickly also helps a lot with logic and mental puzzles because bilinguals are often better at categorising and switching tasks. In a study done where children had to categorise blue and red circles and squares by colour, then by shape, bilingual children were quicker at categorising both times, showing how the training from needing to use one language and suppressing another can help with quick logical thinking.
Lastly, bilinguals being able to switch languages quickly and seamlessly helps with multi-tasking and task prioritisation. This constant ‘mental juggling’ helps the brain build mental flexibility and focus, strengthening cognitive control, which aids bilinguals to switch between concepts, tasks and problems much more easily than monolinguals.
Preserve Your Mind & Reduce Cognitive Decline:
Perhaps one of the best benefits of being bilingual is that it can help decrease the speed or intensity of cognitive decline. Cognitive decline is a completely natural process where the brain becomes less plastic as deterioration happens. While bilingualism cannot halt cognitive decline altogether, it can help slow it down a little bit.
Lots of research suggests that bilingualism definitely does help slow down cognitive decline because bilinguals often have greater cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is the term used when two people may have the same cognitive decline, but may not experience the same cognitive deficits. This means they may delay the onset of neuropathology and/or dementia symptoms.
In a study conducted in a hospital in Toronto, bilingual and monolingual patients had their first consultation dates with a neurologist compared, and on average, the bilingual patients started seeing a neurologist 3 years later than monolingual patients. Moreover, monolingual patients often report noticing symptoms of cognitive deterioration at a younger age than bilinguals. In this particular study, the difference was four years! Imagine having four more years of dementia-free life just because you learnt and regularly used a second language throughout your life!
Even though this all sounds like bliss, bilingualism is most definitely not a cure for cognitive deterioration. Cognitive decline is a natural process that can only be slowed down, but not avoided or cured forever. However, this definitely does not disregard how precious an extra few years without cognitive deficiency can be in a short life of only 80 years.
Thinking Rationally and Decision-Making:
This final benefit of bilingualism is probably the one I found most interesting to find out about and research for, because of just how shocking the results are. According to cognitive tests, being bilingual actually helps your decision-making skills (who would’ve known?).
To explain how bilingualism can help decision-making, I first need to provide the contextual research about bilingualism and emotional reactions, with research findings showing that people have much stronger emotional reactions when speaking a dominant language instead of a non-dominant language, even if proficiency is the same. This can be shown through stroop effect experiments. The Stroop effect is the psychological delay in reaction time when naming the ink colour of a word that conflicts with the word’s meaning. This test was done with emotion words (e.g. happy, sad, dejected, etc.) and colours. Emotional words cause changes to the autonomic nervous system, including heart rate, sweat glands and electrical conductivity, so measurements of electrodermal responses were taken on bilingual speakers in their first language and second language that they learned later in childhood. The shocking finding was that there were fewer electrodermal responses in a second language than in a first language.
Now, we know that when we’re emotional, we are less prone to making rational and logical decisions and rely more on our intuition and, well, emotions. Therefore, it is a reasonable conclusion to come to that approaching decisions in a second language may actually cause a more rational answer to arise compared to if that decision were made in a first language.
To back this up, a really interesting study from the University of Chicago used the famous trolley problem to illustrate this difference. There are two versions of the trolley problem: One version is by Philippa Foot, where there are 5 people tied to a train track who will be killed by an incoming train. The moral agent can either pull a lever to divert the train to another track with only one person tied to it or do nothing at all. Another version by Judith Jarvis Thomas held the same premise, but that the 5 people could only be saved if you pushed a large-sized man in the way of the train and killed him.
In this study, 400 native Spanish speakers who spoke English as a second language were asked what they would choose to do in these two Trolley problems in both English and Spanish. For the trolley problem where the train diverts, the results were quite similar in both languages. However, for the trolley problem where the moral agent must push the large man to save five, only 17% chose to sacrifice the man’s life when asked in Spanish, while in English, that option was chosen 40% of the time, over double the amount in Spanish. To test this further, the experiment was done on native English speakers who spoke Spanish as a second language, and the results came out to be the exact same.
This shows how in a second language, people are more likely to think rationally and condone the killing of 1 man for the saving of 5 (a utilitarian approach), which is a really interesting phenomenon to think about, especially in how speaking a different language, even within the same person, can lead to such drastically different choices.
-
Overall, it is clear that bilingualism sadly won’t give you Einstein-level IQ or help you solve math problems more easily, but there are clearly some amazing benefits to being bilingual, even if you did not grow up learning a second language. These benefits should be everyone’s motivation to keep learning, exploring and expanding their linguistic knowledge to keep their minds sharp, reap the benefits of being bilingual and also to brag that you can speak lots of languages (it’s such a flex)!
Links to Extra Resources:
NYT Article - Why Bilinguals are Smarter: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html
Lots of the research in this article is from Albert Costa’s book ‘The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language’. It’s short, insightful and sometimes wordy, but overall a great read!
