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A new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggests people who speak two languages have more gray matter in the executive control region of the brain.
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."
This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
I find learning more languages makes it easier to acquire new ones because you get better at it, but idiomatic speech and use of metaphor seem to take a real hit.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @09:09PM
As opposed to bilinguals of 1 or more than 2 languages. *rimshot*
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @09:26PM
As opposed to people that can read or write in two languages but can only speak one.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 17 2015, @09:45PM
"Spoken" was not the part I was calling out.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:15AM
So it was just a bad joke that did not make sense due to not even noticing 20% of the words.
(Score: 2) by SrLnclt on Friday July 17 2015, @09:56PM
So where do C, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. fit in?
Or is speaking programming languages now required for earning your nerd card?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @10:51PM
I would say they're pretty similar in their affect on the brain, except it's probably more analogous to speaking Spanish to a Portuguese speaker. If you go slow you can make yourself understood, but if you go fast you miss the bigger picture and finer points, in much the same way that if you know Java you'll be able to tell where a loop is in Perl, but the regex's might still make you scratch your head.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:02AM
That's actually an important aspect of the study. They also looked at the effects of knowing a signed language in addition to one's native language, and that did not correlate with more gray matter. So it is: Bilingual of one spoken and one signed language - no effect on amount of gray matter; bilingual of two spoken languages - more gray matter.