MARY GABLE

(image via NYTimes.com)

I’ve been reading the New York Times online recently (can you tell?) and was excited to come across this article from a few weeks back on some of the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. I’ve been so immersed in my thesis research for the past year or so that psycholinguists like Bialystok and Kovacs now seem like old friends. The piece serves as a good review of recent research on bilingualism, but I have one quibble: speaking two languages doesn’t “make you smarter,” or “improve” your cognitive skills, as the author claims.

It’s one of those characteristic flaws of popular science writing, that’s been drilled into my head to avoid since Psych 101: reading more into a set of data than is actually there. Assuming that one thing ‘causes’ another; that a test ‘proves’ something to be true; that learning a language ‘makes you smarter.’ To take the Bialystok and Martin experiment, for instance, it’s not as though the researchers taught children to speak a new language, which led to faster card sorting; participants simply had been exposed to two languages from birth, or they hadn’t.

It’s a subtle distinction, but a crucial one: perhaps there was something else that set the bilingual and monolingual children apart. Maybe members of one group were tested mid-morning, and the others after an afternoon snack, when they’d much rather be settling down for a nap than sorting colored cards for a stranger in a lab coat. Maybe other children had had better schooling, more support from their parents to succeed, were hungry or shy or just feeling sick that day. And even if bilingual children did manage to sort cards faster their monolingual daycare-mates, does this really mean that they were smarter?

We don’t know the answers to these questions, and Bialystok and Martin don’t tell us. Yet as seductive as data sets may be in leading us to groundbreaking conclusions, life is far too complex to reduce to mere cause and effect.