After reading the article, "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter," there are some things that I agree on, but there are other things that I am skeptical about.
I do not believe that being a bilingual directly makes someone smarter. Intelligence, in my opinion, is too difficult to measure. A carpenter, in educational terms, may seem unintelligent when compared to a scholar. However, when asked to build something in real-life, the carpenter may be able to build something better through experience. The scholar may know all the rules and physics to build to "perfect" system, but sometimes math does not consider all the variables (e.g. physics students are often given a questions that tell you to consider the problem in a frictionless environment to make the problem easier to solve). I know personally multiple people that are monolingual that are able to tackle situations better than I, a bilingual, can, and I know multiple people that are bilingual that are "smarter" than I am. From my experience learning in a math and chemistry statistics class, I know that statistics should be taken seriously, and all sources should be examined closely in the case that numbers, graphs, or charts are skewed to fit one's argument. Even though several studies are cited to support how bilinguals are smart, I do not believe that it necessarily makes them smarter than monolinguals.
I do, however, support that being bilingual may help battle Alzheimer's disease. Being bilingual may help keep more parts of the brain active in order to prevent the disease. Being bilingual may help one learn information more efficiently, such as a new language. For example, Japanese and Korean share some of the same words as Chinese words; however, the example where the 2009 study with Agnes Kovacs talking about how the bilingual baby was able to adapt better than the monolingual may raise skepticism. Everyone learns differently. One baby may be a more visual learner, where another requires repetition and audio aid.
The article raises interesting thoughts, but should be taken with a grain of salt.
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