Growing up as a native Spanish speaker attending an American school, all I heard from people was that being bilingual was going to be a huge advantage for me in the future. For me, it was never a huge deal because I grew up knowing both languages and that was just normal to me. Other people thought it was really impressive, which made them think that I was somehow smarter, since apparently people who can speak more than one language are smarter than monolinguals. I never felt particularly smarter than others just because I was lucky enough to be taught more than one language growing up, but I still find myself wanting to know if being bilingual makes a difference in a person’s level of intelligence.

Up until the last century, it was assumed that teaching a child more than one language would confuse him or her and be detrimental towards their cognitive development. However, this idea was challenged by Ellen Bialystok of York University, who used a series of studies to prove that bilingual people actually show better performance on cognitive control tasks, since she argues that bilinguals are better at suppressing irrelevant or interfering information. She says that they have an easier time doing this because they already have to do that every day, by suppressing words from one language in their mind while they are speaking the other language. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I guess I’m technically doing it right now as I’m writing this. My brain is suppressing the irrelevant Spanish words and phrases I know, and instead only accessing the English ones. According to these researchers, doing this gives your brain a “workout”, which ultimately makes you smarter.

There is evidence that bilingual children solve non-verbal conflict tasks differently from monolingual children, as reported in a study by Bialystok and Majumder. Eight-year-old children were given a variety of non-verbal problems to solve, with or without perceptual distractions. Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals in the tasks with the distractions, but both groups were pretty equal in the ones without distractions. “Older people were also tested in a different study, in which participants were shown either a green or a red square on each trial, and they had to press a specific key as rapidly as possible in response.” The keys were situated in two different places in two separate instances, in order to compare the reaction times from both groups. The first instance showed no differences in reaction times from both the bilingual and monolingual groups, and the keys were located centrally on the screen. On the second instance, the keys were located laterally, one above the correct response and the other one above the incorrect one. Bilinguals performed better in this study than monolinguals at all ages. However, this advantage was only seen in the young children and older adult group, but for some reason not in the young adult one, which suggests that this advantage is only greater in young and older people, maybe due to the fact that young adults are at their peak age for developing cognitive control.

My final takeaway on this topic is that there might be a correlation between improvement in cognitive control tasks and being bilingual. However, there is no evidence that fully proves that being bilingual somehow makes you “smarter”, according to these studies it simply means bilinguals might have some advantages in certain tasks.

Picture links:

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