[rjzzleep]

I find this discussion absurd. Here's a paper that most people have not read and then add their own subjective anecdote to it to confirm their personal opinion.

Has anyone bothered to look at the tests that determine cognitive ability in this context? Here's one(or it's advanced version the double trouble test):

“assess the ability to inhibit cognitive interference that occurs when processing of a specific stimulus feature impedes the simultaneous processing of a second stimulus attribute.”[1]

What this test is basically saying is that being bilingual doesn't give you an edge at playing Lumosity, because as we have learned from past discussion these brain improvement apps don't actually "improve your brain"(whatever that may mean), they just train your performance on certain tasks. Why does measuring concentration relate to being bilingual?

What the personal comment below does in fact try to remind people of indirectly is that being natively multilingual actually makes it harder for a person to be controlled and directed and by extension give you access to vastly different perspectives on a lot of topics especially when those languages stem from different language families.

[1] https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-ab...

[isaacfrond]

Hear hear! Exactly my point. Can knowing a second language be a benefit. Well if you like Spanish movies, then being fluent in Spanish will certainly increase you enjoyment. Nobody denies that.

Will it make you a better chess player? The simple answer appears to be: no.

It one my gripes with classical education. What benefit is there of learning Latin? Well, you can read Virgil in the original, and if that is your thing, power to you. Will it make you a better person? No, just no.

(Maybe, you'll have a slight, slight advantage when learning another Roman language. But surely, you would have been much better off to learn French to begin with, if that was the goal.)

[denton-scratch]

> What benefit is there of learning Latin?

I had to do 10 years of Latin; I hated it. I eventually scraped a bare pass on my second try at the exam.

I'm sure my knowledge of my mother-tongue, English, is much enhanced by having studied Latin. To the extent that cognition is verbal[0], knowing your own language better must improve cognition?

[0] I suspect the researchers' definition of cognition is carefully tuned to exclude verbal thinking.

[Planktonne]

If you speak a language that has been influenced by Latin, learning Latin is really useful for understanding our own language.

Additionally, because of the way that Latin is taught, you learn a lot of classical history and philosophy through the process, which - given the impact of Rome on the world - is useful across a wide range of disciplines.

[Kretinsky]

Knowing well Latin makes it easier to learn new languages that inherit from it, both on the vocab side and the grammar side. French doesn't really have declinations, for instance. My wife studied it extensively during her studies, and she can pick new languages much quicker than me due to this.

[denton-scratch]

> Here's a paper that most people have not read

I put my hand up: I didn't read the paper (just the abstract). Their findings surprised me.

I speak (quite badly, nowadays) French and German, as well as my mother-tongue, English. I'm quite sure that my understanding of my own language is greatly enhanced by knowing French and German. And I'd be very surprised if a better knowledge of your native language doesn't enhance at least some aspects of cognition.

But this is a particular constellation of languages: if you exclude modern loanwords, it seems to me that the flow of vocabulary has been mainly from French and German into English, rather than vice-versa.

Decades ago, I did a class in Mandarin (now completely forgotten, except a few phrases). I don't think knowledge of Mandarin improved my understanding of my mother tongue at all.

So my surprise is that the researchers found no cognitive enhancement at all.

Perhaps their cognition test battery excludes those aspects of cognition that depend on thinking with words? It seems to me that I think mainly with words.

[nohaydeprobleme]

As a reader of the research paper, another limitation of the study is that the study did not appear to differentiate between people who learned a second language as an adult, versus people who grew up bilingual.

~~

To add context on how participants self-reported their bilingualism, the authors wrote: "To obtain information about the number of languages spoken, which languages were spoken, and demographic variables (such as age, country of origin, SES, and education), we asked participants to complete a detailed questionnaire. The questions used in the present study are available in Appendix S1 in the Supplemental Material available online."

From the downloaded supplementary material, the only questions asked related to language assessment were:

"5. What language(s) do you primarily speak at home?

"6. How many languages do you speak? Select one: 1-20"

I could not find any other questions related to language assessment.

~~

From the questionnaire, it looks like the researchers did not examine whether studying a second language as an adult to a very high level could confer cognitive advantages. The study possibly treated people who grew up bilingual and didn't acquire a second language as an adult, and also people who self-reported as bilingual but did not reach a high level in the language, into the same group.

The conclusions of the study would be stronger if the researchers examined how the cognitive abilities of monolingual people who undergo training in a second language and practice it to an advanced level, could change their cognitive abilities over time.

In fact, it remains plausible that adult language acquisition could still provide cognitive benefits. Another research paper with conflicting conclusions [1] studied the effect of language acquisition on older adults aged 59–79 years old. The authors of this different study concluded that "learning a foreign-language may represent a potentially helpful cognitive intervention for promoting healthy aging."

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.0042...