I found the articles on the co-relation between being bilingual and being smarter to be very interesting. The NYT article seemed to hint that being bilingual increases one's executive function, which trains the mind to have higher cognitive function and to ignore distractions. The fact that bilinguals have to deal with roughly double the amount of information while processing words trains them to sift through a larger amount of information than monolinguals.
The Science Line article disputes the relation between executive function and intelligence, stating that the two are different. The article says that executive function can be acquired at a later point in one's life.
I found it interesting that people used to believe that teaching a child two languages at once was a hindrance to their learning. I was exposed to both Hindi and English from an early age, and starting learning French at twelve. While I obviously can't make any claims on how learning multiple languages has affected my intelligence, I can safely agree with the authors that the extra information to sift through has helped me retain a greater amount of information. Something these articles miss out on talking about is that being bilingual also exposes you to different kinds of people and personalities, which also increases one's emotional intelligence.
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