The article about bilinguals was surprising to me because I had never quite thought about how new languages can form a person's perspective of thinking. In my Intro to Linguistics, I learned about the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis in which Whorf said that one's mother tongue influenced the way a person perceived the world, but that it also restricted their ability to perceive in ways outside of their language. His argument was half correct because he asserted that because of that restriction a speaker would never be able to understand concepts outside their language. Increasingly, his ideas are resurfacing because his statement that language shapes the way one sees the world and interacts with it was correct, but the fact that it would forever restrict their ability to think outside their language was wrong. In fact, if a person learned a different language, their perspective would begin changing because of the new language construct. It is for that reason that bilinguals are "smarter", they have more than one way to think and different concepts to see the world in.
I believe that the more languages a person knows, the easier they are able to pick up other languages and their concepts of time or color. Learning languages means more vocabulary, syntax understanding, and more. As a multi-lingual person, I feel better about my capabilities!
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