Are People Who Speak More Than One Language Smarter?
08 March 2011
5-year-old students Perla Ortiz, left, and Yahir Perez at a bilingual school in Mesquite, Texas last month
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
In the early nineteen fifties, researchers found that people scored lower on intelligence tests if they spoke more than one language. Research in the sixties found the opposite. So which is it?
Researchers presented their newest studies last month at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The latest evidence shows that being bilingual does not necessarily make people smarter. But researcher Ellen Bialystock says it probably does make you better at certain skills.
ELLEN BIALYSTOCK: "Imagine driving down the highway. There’s many things that could capture your attention and you really need to be able to monitor all of them. Why would bilingualism make you any better at that?"
And the answer, she says, is that bilingual people are often better at controlling their attention -- a function called the executive control system.
ELLEN BIALYSTOCK: "It’s quite possibly the most important cognitive system we have because it's where all of your decisions about what to attend to, what to ignore, what to process are made."
Ms. Bialystock is a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. She says the best method to measure the executive control system is called the Stroop Test. A person is shown words in different colors. The person has to ignore the word but say the color. The problem is that the words are all names of colors.
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