This article was published by Maria Konnikova, a Russian-American writer and psychologist, on the 22th January 2015. It was retrieved from the magazine “The New Yorker” which publishes poetry, fiction, reviews, essays and even cartoons. This article deals with a question: Does bilingualism, the ability to speak two languages, is an advantage?
Since the second half of the twentieth century, scientific literature exhibits a positive effect about the ability to spoke two languages on the brain development and on the executive control. The executive control refers to planification – the ability to organize and to plan tasks in order to achieve a goal -, abstraction – the ability to manipulate concepts -, deduction by logical reasoning, cognitive flexibility – the ability to switch from a task to another, and is often linked to academic performance. However, this article presents the story of Angela de Bruin, a bilingual assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of York, who decided to conduct a study in order to point out the advantage to be bilingual on executive control. Her study did not show the expected result, so she began to analyse the overview of bilingualism cognitive effect in scientific field. Her analysis highlighted a bias against reporting negative result in this research’s field. She discovered that 68% of the studies that emphasize the increasement of executive control thanks to bilingualism were published, while only 29% of the studies that show no effects of bilingualism on executive control were. Despite this finding, Angela de Bruin still believes in the cognitive advantage of bilingualism but not so far on executive control. She conducted a study which showed that bilingualism seems to slow down the clinical outcomes of Dementia. Dementia’s symptoms seem to appear later on bilingual individuals. So, bilingualism would protect cognitive decline which is consistent with the framework of Cognitive Reserve which postulates that keeping your brain stimulated with new learnings postpones the cognitive decline.
This article is not addressed to Scientific audience, it refers to scientific field but doesn’t use too much scientific vocabulary in order to be understood by everyone. Moreover, I think that this article is relevant because it does not just corroborate the overreliance idea “being able to speak to language makes me more intelligent”, it also proposes something different. Somehow, this article breaks a preconceived idea and, in the same time, describes another lead to investigate. Furthermore, the lead about the benefit of bilingualism on delaying cognitive decline is consistent with or knowledge about the onset of dementia symptoms.
Another fact emerges from this article. Obviously, the publication bias in the scientific field is a big outcome. The fact that editors only publish studies that demonstrate effects is potentially damageable because, in this case, scientific publication does not reflect reality anymore…That shows that scientific research isn’t 100% reliable and it involves taking caution to what you read in. Along my studies in the psychology department at the University of Nantes, I had the opportunity to read some articles about the “publication bias” which is the publishers inclination to only accept to publish studies which highlight an effect. As a result, when you check the overview, you will find a lot of articles which showed the expected effect and you will rarely find an experiment that did not showed the expected effect… So, let’s be vigilant!
Words I have learnt: to emphasise = accentuer; despite = malgré; to postpone = repousser; overreliance = idée communément admise; reliable = fiable.