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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 20 2015, @12:59AM
American and Australian worldviews are not *that* different, in fact they're not very different at all compared to any other two random pairings. They're probably closer than most other pairings in fact, except maybe US and Canada (though there's a big exception for French Canadians), or Australia and NZ.
Welsh is probably quite a bit more different since there's actually a whole different language there, called "Welsh". Yes, Welsh people probably all speak English too, but they also have their own native language that's quite a bit different. Scottish too, but to a lesser extent. Same for Irish. It probably doesn't help that all three of those countries were conquered by the English.
BTW, don't take this prejudice of mine too seriously.
There might be something to it, I'm just pointing out that some languages are much more different (from one's native language) than others, so being multilingual in languages that are all very closely related isn't the same as being fluent in languages that are nothing alike (e.g. Mandarin and Swahili), so maybe the effect is much more pronounced for those people.