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Does a foreign language help you think?

18.01.2015

We often hear that learning foreign languages improves cognitive abilities. Last year, for example, we wrote about a study by employees of the University of Edinburgh (Great Britain), who found out that a foreign language stimulates attention and helps to concentrate; moreover, the cognitive effect happens regardless of whether you started learning the language in early childhood or after school. And this is just one of the huge number of works that say that - yes, the knowledge of several languages is only good for the intellect.

However, one feature emerged here. Angela de Bruin of the University of Edinburgh has noticed that in private conversations with those who study the influence of a second language on intelligence, one can hear about results that do not support the theory of "cognitive benefit" and which are then not included in publications. For example, there is evidence that bilingualism helps to concentrate attention, not be distracted by extraneous stimuli when we are busy with something - and there is other evidence that not only contradicts the hypothesis, but does not fit into it. Such information is not hushed up, they are not hidden, they simply remain in the archives and are not included in the publication.

Why is this happening? One of the reasons is the inertia of thinking and fashion, which, unfortunately, also take place in science. Angela de Bruyne and her colleagues analyzed more than a hundred reports on the influence of a foreign language on cognitive abilities, which were presented at various conferences from 1999 to 2012. Then these same reports were compared with how many of them reached publication in an international scientific journal.

As the authors of the study write in their article in Psychological Science, 38% of scientific reports described experiments that confirmed the hypothesis of the cognitive advantage of a second language, 13% had indeterminate results that said the hypothesis “more likely than not”, another 32% said “rather no than yes", and, finally, 16% of the works claimed that the hypothesis of the beneficialness of the second language for the brain is not true.

Half of the reports were published, and most of the data accepted for publication (63%) spoke to some extent about the benefits of bilingualism. Of those that questioned this hypothesis, only 36% were published. Here one might assume that studies with a negative result were not very reliable, for example, they relied on insufficient statistics. However, de Bruyne and his colleagues specifically emphasize that such a bias is not related to the methodological features of the "negative" works.

The reason, most likely, lies in the psychology of both the experimenters themselves and the journal reviewers - both of them may give preference to those data that speak in favor of the cognitive benefits of a foreign language. As a result, everyone gets the impression that the hypothesis is absolutely proven (since a scientific article has a higher status than a report at a conference), although if you take the whole set of data on the problem, this impression can be greatly shaken. There is only one general conclusion from this: it is necessary to follow as closely as possible those areas of science that are of increased public interest, whether in psychology or molecular biology, and regularly conduct such sanitary scientific research in them with a complete analysis of the accumulated data.

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