This week I read two articles about bilinguals and how scientist consider them to be smarter than monolinguals, whereas others questioned, what exactly made bilinguals smarter than monolinguals. I do not consider myself to be bilingual because even though I studied French for around 6 years, I am not fluent in the language, in fact as the years of study went on, I started to lose interest in it. In the article, “Why Bilinguals are Smarter”, the writer mentioned how people who were bilingual tend to be smarter and he even used the example of the children who were asked to sort blue circles and red squares into bins on the computer. At the end of this task, it seems that the bilingual students did better. What the writer also mentioned was that those who are bilingual are able to concentrate more on tasks and ignore distractions. They also have the ability to switch their attention from one thing to another, like driving while memorizing directions.
However, in the second article, “Are bilinguals really smart?”, the writer questioned whether what science said about bilinguals being smart was true or not. He also wondered if those who may have learned a second language growing up could be considered about of this smart club of bilinguals, but in my opinion I think it depends on how well you know that second language. He did admit that bilinguals would know more vocabulary words because they know 2 languages, but the amount of vocabulary words that they may know in the individual languages tends to differ from each other. I wonder if the “smartness level” increases with the more languages that you know or does it stay about the same for whether you are bilingual or trilingual, etc.
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