The brain benefits immensely from speaking two or more languages. Cognitive skills improve, denser grey matter develops, decision-making skills are enhanced, and the onset of dementia can be delayed. Bilingualism improves children's test scores and critical thinking abilities, as well as concentration and multi-tasking abilities. Speaking two languages also means a better salary in the workforce across a wide array of professions.
Biculturals take part, to varying degrees, in the life of two or more cultures. They adapt their attitudes, behaviors, and values to these cultures and they combine and blend aspects of the cultures involved.
It has long been known that there are many advantages to being bicultural such as having a greater number of social networks, being aware of cultural differences, taking part in the life of two or more cultures, being an intermediary between cultures, and so on. Recent research shows that biculturals are also characterized by greater creativity and professional success.
In a recent paper, comprising three studies, researchers Carmit Tadmor, Adam Galinsky and William Maddux compared the results of bicultural participants to those who were not bicultural. In the first study, MBA students at a large business school in Europe who had lived abroad for an average of four years were given a creative uses task. They were shown the picture of a brick and were given two minutes to write down as many creative uses of it as they could think of. When three components of creativity were examined, the biculturals exhibited more fluency (they generated more ideas), more flexibility (they generated a greater number of ideas), and more novelty (they were more creative in their suggestions).
In a second study, the researchers examined how biculturalism affects real-world innovations in a group of MBA students at a business school in the United States. Here again the participants had lived abroad and came from different countries of origin. The study examined how many new businesses the participants had started, how many novel products or services they had invented, and how many breakthrough process innovations they had created. Biculturals once again did better than the other participants.
Finally, in a third study, the question asked was whether being bicultural leads to professional success (as measured by the rate of managerial advancement), and to an increase in managerial reputation (as judged by peers). This time, the group of participants were Israeli professionals in the United States who had worked on the West Coast, primarily in Silicon Valley, for slightly more than eight years on average. What was found is that biculturals achieved higher promotion rate and had more positive reputations than those who were not bicultural.
The authors of the study explained this enhanced creativity and professional success in biculturals by means of a psychological mechanism, integrative complexity, which is the capacity and willingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of competing perspectives on the same issue, on the one hand, and the ability to forge conceptual links among these perspectives, on the other. It is a capacity that involves considering and combining multiple perspectives.
According to the authors, biculturals have an enhanced ability to carefully weigh the merits of alternative perspectives. They view things from these different perspectives and integrate them into a coherent whole. They also recombine different existing ideas to make novel connections between concepts.
The enhanced integrative complexity that biculturals show has implications for a number of tasks such as effective information search, greater tolerance for ambiguous information, less susceptibility to information overload, and so on.
As a bicultural myself, and always interested in pursuing alternative perspectives, I wrote to the senior author of the paper, Dr. Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University, to enquire whether one can't develop integrative complexity by remaining monocultural. I felt I had experienced one way of doing so in my English school during my youth by taking part in the debates that took place once a week. We were given the task of defending or opposing a particular position without being able to choose the side we were on. Thus we often spoke in favor of a point of view that was not ours and hence we were forced to see both sides of an issue.
Carmit Tadmor replied that you can indeed achieve higher levels of integrative complexity in a number of ways such as the one I had mentioned to her, among many others. Biculturalism is one such way but not the only way. I came away from our exchange, feeling relieved for monoculturals and happy for biculturals–an optimal best-of-both-worlds situation!
References
A selective attentive focus and the ability to block out distraction are seminal executive functions that are minimally developed in youngsters. These functions gradually become stronger throughout the years of prefrontal cortex maturation, which last into the twenties. It is with regard to these executive functions that research about the "bilingual brain" is particularly exciting.
The research refers to children raised with a language at home that differs from the dominant language outside the home, such as in school. Compared to monolinguals, the bilingual children develop greater attention focus, distraction resistance, decision-making judgment and responsiveness to feedback. The correlated fMRI scans of these children reveal more activity in the prefrontal cortex networks that control these executive functions.
The leading explanation for this correlation is the need of bilinguals to frequently "select" which language is needed, what words fit the linguistic criteria and how to convey their intended meaning each time they communicate. To do this, the brain must actively evaluate between the competing language systems and deliberately focus attention on the chosen language.
The research interpretation of the fMRI and cognitive tests is that the ongoing evaluation and selection process in bilingual children exercises brain circuits which regulate attention control and block distraction. This neural network activation of the executive functions is one suggested explanation for the higher performance in cognitive tests by children who have had five to ten years of bilingual exposure (Bialystok, 2009; Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2007). Further studies are investigating whether similar benefits are found in children who have exposure to a second language later in life.
The implications of the bilingual research also relate to the influence of the higher brain's executive functions on working (short-term) memory strength down in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the relay station where new information is first encoded into memory before moving up to the prefrontal cortex for further processing into long-term memory. In the mature brain, the amount of information that can be "held" in mind for active processing in working memory is limited to somewhere between five and nine chunks of data.
"Holding" is what happens in your working memory when you perform the separate steps of mentally multiplying 11 x 15. Most people calculate the product of 10 x 15 and hold that 150 in mind while they calculate 1 x 15. The 150 is then reactivated and added to the 15. The limitation of holding data while simultaneously processing data is why you can't multiply 2417 x 429 mentally. There is simply too much information to store in the hippocampus while you carry out all those separate multiplications.
In the bilingual children, the higher performance in nonverbal cognition suggests that "holding" information in their working memory also benefits their early and frequent executive function exercise of paying attention to and evaluating language.
The incoming research supports encouraging parents to retain use of their native language in the home. The implications also raise considerations of what other early exposures and in-school experiences can be designed to promote these executive function activations in all children. What other planned learning activities can be so engaging as to promote the activation and strengthening of young children's developing networks of attentive focus? Should second language instruction begin earlier in elementary school?
I'll keep you posted as further research becomes available, and I look forward to your contributions to this dialogue.
References
Bilinguals slower to build vocabulary but better at multitasking
Children who grow up learning to speak two languages are better at switching between tasks than are children who learn to speak only one language, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. However, the study also found that bilinguals are slower to acquire vocabulary than are monolinguals, because bilinguals must divide their time between two languages while monolinguals focus on only one.
In the study, bilingual and monolingual children were asked to press a computer key as they viewed a series of images — either of animals or of depictions of colors. When the responses were limited to either of the two categories, the children responded at the same speed. But when the children were asked to switch, from animals to a color, and press a different button for the new category, bilinguals were faster at making the change than were the monolinguals.
Researchers often use this switching task to gauge a set of mental processes known as executive functioning—generally defined as the ability to pay attention, plan, organize, and strategize. The task engages three mental processes: the ability to keep a rule or principle in mind (working memory), inhibition (the ability to refrain from carrying out one rule), and shifting (the ability to make the change and act on another rule).
“In simplest terms, the switching task is an indicator of the ability to multi-task,” said Peggy McCardle, Ph.D., chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which provided funding for the study. “Bilinguals have two sets of language rules in mind, and their brains apparently are wired to toggle back and forth between them depending on the circumstances.”
The study, published online in Child Development, was conducted by Raluca Barac and Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto, Canada. The researchers tested a total of 104 children. They compared test results of English-speaking monolinguals to those of Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, and Spanish-English bilinguals.
The NICHD’s Child Development and Behavior Branch sponsors research on reading and reading disabilities, with the goal of identifying those factors that help English speaking children, bilinguals, and children who learn English as a second language become proficient in reading and writing in English. In 2009, 21 percent of U.S. children spoke a language other than English at home.
Dr. McCardle noted that, in the United States, studies of bilingualism are often complicated by the cultural and economic differences between the majority, English-speaking monolinguals and bilingual, or second language-learning immigrant groups, who often also lack economic resources. For this reason, researchers don’t know if the difference they may see in test scores between groups is due to bilingualism itself, or to the economic differences between recent immigrants and those whose families have been in the country longer. Canada has a large French speaking population, with income levels comparable to that of the English speaking population. For this reason, the researchers of the current study could rule out economic differences as a potential contributor to the study results, at least when comparing English-speaking monolinguals to the French-English bilinguals.
In the study, the researchers tested verbal and nonverbal cognitive abilities of 104 6-year-old children from the Toronto area. All were public school students, and from similar economic and social backgrounds. In addition to English monolinguals and English-French bilinguals, the study also included English-Spanish and English-Chinese bilinguals. Along with the switching task, the test battery consisted of three English language tests of verbal ability. The verbal tests measured vocabulary and children’s understanding of such linguistic tasks as forming plurals, conjugating verbs, grammatical structure, and English pronunciation rules.
For the switching task, accuracy scores were similar for all the groups, with the groups choosing the correct option approximately the same proportion of times. However, all of the bilinguals could switch from one task to another more rapidly than could the monolinguals.
Earlier studies also had shown that bilinguals could perform the switching task more rapidly than could monolinguals. However, these studies tended to include only one group of bilinguals, and so couldn’t rule out whether it was bilingualism itself that conferred the increased ability to make the switch, or whether it was some aspect of the language the bilinguals spoke. The fact that all three groups of bilinguals in the current study could make the switch faster than could the monolinguals indicates that it’s the bilingualism itself that confers the more rapid switching ability.
In tests of verbal ability, the English language monolinguals scored highest on a measure of English receptive vocabulary—the body of words a person recognizes well enough to comprehend when hearing them or listening to them. Because they have to learn only English, the monolinguals were able to acquire a larger vocabulary than could any of the bilingual groups, who need to divide their time between acquiring two vocabularies. However, English-Spanish bilinguals scored nearly as well as English monolinguals on the measure of receptive vocabulary.
The monolinguals also scored higher than did the other groups on a test measuring knowledge of English grammar and word meaning. The English-Spanish bilinguals scored higher on the grammatical test than did the Chinese-English bilinguals, who scored higher than did English-French bilinguals. The Spanish bilinguals attended English language schools, which may have provided an advantage in tests of English grammar in comparison to the French bilinguals, who attended French language schools.
The Spanish bilinguals scored highest on the test of metalinguistic awareness— an understanding of the structure of words as a basis for forming plurals, possessive, verb tenses, and compound words. The monolinguals and the Chinese and French bilinguals received comparable scores on the metalinguistic test. The researchers concluded that the similarity of Spanish to English, and the fact that the Spanish bilinguals attended English speaking schools likely combined to give the Spanish bilinguals an advantage over all the other groups on the metalinguistic task, and an advantage over all of the bilingual groups in the other language tasks.
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