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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:27AM
Wouldn't that make you feel better? Alas, you, and the moderator who modded your comment "informative", are clinging to the no true Scotsman fallacy. The study found that larger gray matter correlates with Spanish-English bilingualism compared to just English. They disproved your hypothesis before you even wrote it down.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:06AM
If you don't know what the phrase "No true Scotsman" means, then you really shouldn't accuse other people of making that mistake. "No true Scotsman" refers to choosing definitions for the sake of establishing the question, rather than choosing them in a more sound and generally useful fashion.
When I say that learning 2 languages in the same language group isn't really being bilingual, it is just learning a new vocabulary, it isn't "No true Scotsman". I'm making the very point that it is a more natural definition. As stated, language is more than vocabulary, it is grammar, culture, different styles of logic, etc. Simply learning vocabulary isn't the same as learning language.
And as far as their articles claim goes, it isn't surprising at all. "People who are proficient at X have more grey matter" is probably true of anything that requires memorization or fast mental acuity. Such as being a concert pianist, or an electrical engineer, or a top poker player. Is it more likely that learning language made your brain grow, or that people with strong mental abilities learned some vocabulary or language in their free time?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:59PM
Spanish and English are from different language groups, just like Russian and German. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a Romance language. Of course, all these languages are Indo-European languages, but that's a really big group of languages that spans most of the world, except for African, far east, and Pacific Island languages, and some other aboriginal languages.