105 - Journal 10, "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter" article

[Aromi Lee]

The NY Times article, 'Why bilinguals are smarter,' would be better titled 'why bilinguals are more efficient than their monolingual peers at multitasking.' The difficulties of defining and assessing Intelligence is already well-known (see Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences) but the article seems to skim over this fact and deems it sufficient to cite reasons, such as bilingualism improves multi-tasking abilities, brain-usage efficiency, resistance to dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, as irrefutable markers of intelligence. These are all enticing reasons to become bilingual but to conclude that it makes one smarter is misleading. Furthermore, I wonder what conclusions can/could be/are/were drawn from studies testing polyglots versus biglots and monoglots, and whether multilingualism offers more benefits than bilingualism and monolingualism.