Whether or not bilinguals are actually smarter or not, the cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals are interesting. Without large sample sizes etc. it would be hard for me to use my personal experiences as evidence supporting these theories, but I do find that they match my experiences. Though I would not classify myself as bilingual in regard to fluency, I have grown up hearing two languages constantly (I stopped speaking Nepali at the age of 3 when my family moved to the US for my father's last year of his master's) and I speak several languages (particularly, for both Spanish and Nepali, if I know the vocabulary necessary then I can fluidly and easily say what I am thinking). According to the articles, bilinguals have a better capacity for blocking out distractions and solving mental puzzles. I have been told, and have noticed myself, that when I begin focusing on schoolwork I become very hard to distract (even though I do get distracted easily when not intentionally focusing on something). Throughout grade school my math teachers were always telling me to show all the work I did to reach the answer to a question, but I constantly reverted back to doing large portions of the mathematics in my head because I found it easier and less time consuming than writing out all the numbers and calculations. Even in college I find that I enjoy and understand mental puzzles quite well - we do many thought experiments, formulating predicate logic etc. in philosophy, which is the concentration of my major.
Further, the articles stated that bilinguals often have reduced vocabulary in each of their languages, despite a larger total vocabulary. I find that my own English vocabulary is more limited than most native speakers despite speaking English at home and at school (and there are many words from Nepali that I use when thinking in English because I either do not know the word in English or I find that the Nepali word conveys what I want to say better). This smaller vocabulary has been evident to me from everything between my SAT scores (my reading score substantially higher than my writing score because I could infer the meanings of words in sentences, but words like those were not actually a part of my "vocabulary") to the amount of time and difficulty I face when struggling to find the word that properly conveys the meaning I intend while writing papers or even speaking in English.
Comments