[The_Colonel]

> It's long been stated in popular culture that learning a language increases cognitive ability: improves memory, reasoning, and helps reduce onset of senility etc. This study suggests it isn't.

The study is about "bilingualism", not about "learning". Bilingualism is a passive property, e.g. children born to parents speaking different languages will acquire those languages, but in adulthood no longer be in the process of learning them.

"learning" is an active mental process and those beneficial properties you mention are ascribed to this.

[zuminator]

On the contrary the beneficial properties are popularly ascribed to bilingualism itself.

For example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefi...?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-being-bilingual-make-you-s...

Although it seems that skepticism about this truism goes back a few years as well.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614557866

[kriro]

My main "issue" with the paper (which I really like just to be clear) is that I can't completely figure out how they grouped someone as bilingual (maybe that's on me but it doesn't seem very clear in the methods section). It seems they used self identification by the participants (18+ old). If that's the case someone that learned the language in school would be considered bilingual. For example, if the questionaire asked me which languages I'd feel confident speaking or something similar I'd certainly include Englisch even though I learned it in school/from books/TV and neither of my parents speak it. I'd find it much more interesting if they could somehow split between people raised in a bilingual environment vs. people that learned another language.

[lupire]

It's impressive that your comments reads like a well-educated native speaker of English, except for "Englisch".

Anyway, your English is far, far better than "learned it in school". Those books and TV(And fluent English users in school?) were an effective immersion. It's quite different from the common USA style of learning a non-English language: "5 years of classes but no immersit in culture"

[The_Colonel]

Immersion in English is easy because there's so much quality content on the internet. It's often THE motivation to learn the language.

I'm learning German and there's a surprising lack of quality media. I don't want to throw shade on contemporary German culture, but it's just a very different level from the English-speaking world. My native language is Czech - which has a small cultural sphere - yet somehow the German-speaking cultural sphere does seem more similar in size to the Czech-speaking one than to the English-speaking one.

[mannykannot]

One could always ask additional and more specific questions, such as whether the subject learned more than one language as an infant. On the other hand, it is not clear to me from the abstract alone whether the authors were concerned with when their subjects learned their languages, though it may be clear enough to the intended audience.