Salomon wonders about the elusive connection between language and intelligence: does having multiple languages make us smarter?
The answer is probably yes. Psychological research tends to confirm the impression of sages that multilingualism is a hallmark of wisdom "there are no sitters in the Sanhedrin but those with wisdom... and know seventy tongues". Recognition of the benefits of learning two languages at a young age was slowly established. The father of modern pedagogy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau underestimated the benefit of learning a foreign language for children. Rousseau saw the main role of the educator to present the world to his student in a natural way, that is, through practical experience and receiving direct information from the senses "Let us not jump at once from tangible objects to spiritual objects... no book without the world, no information without the facts. "
Learning foreign languages (such as memorizing Latin in the education of nobles in his time) was in his eyes a kind of fruitless study of words designed to present a semblance of education "knowledge that is easy to display and can be shown whenever the desire arises". Until the XNUMXs, welfare knew that bilingualism hindered cognitive development, the reason for this being that the population of bilingual children were mainly members of immigrant families with a low economic-social status. When comparing similar populations, it becomes clear that children who grew up in a multilingual environment, i.e. those who acquired two languages at a native level, do better in tests that require complex thinking abilities.
What is less clear are the types of intelligence in which the multilingual excel and what is in the additional language that makes this difference. Ellen Bialisok, who studied the nature of differences between multilinguals and monolinguals, mapped the areas in which the advantage of those who acquired another language in childhood is evident. The transition between 2 languages strengthens the control of the information processing mechanisms, a bilingual child has a better ability to focus on relevant information and ignore distracting information. A typical test for testing the ability to filter information is the "Simon task" - the examinee in front of the computer screen is required to press the right button when a green object appears and the left key when a red object appears. The stimuli on the screen sometimes appear on the right side and sometimes on the left side so that the examinee is required to ignore the distracting information (body position) and act only according to the color.
Bilingual children defeat their monolingual friends in such tasks. This indicates a higher ability to organize information and control. Part of the advantage is precisely the ability required of those who live in a multilingual environment to "turn off" the pronunciation of one language when communicating in the other and to ignore the vocabulary, grammar rules and associations associated with it. The ability to move quickly from one set of rules to another is tested in tests where the examinee is required to undergo a continuous series of tests in which the rules of the game change and the ability to quickly forget the previous rules and adapt to new ones is required and when it is required to handle confusing and contradictory items of information. It should be noted that the question of whether this advantage is preserved even in adulthood is controversial.
Differences are also evident in tasks where meta-linguistic understanding is required, that is, when language becomes a self-evident intuitive tool into a subject of investigation and testing. "The fish will be the last to discover the water" claims the proverb and we are fish swimming in the language; Children acquire a great deal of linguistic knowledge: vocabulary and syntax when they learn to speak, but this knowledge is often encapsulated and not explicitly formulated. So only when we find out only in first grade and discover that every word is divided into syllables and only in middle school that the words we have created all our days are verbs, nouns and adjectives.
Those who have learned another language are forced to use one language as a tool to test the other language. It is interesting to note that Rousseau, who as mentioned denied the study of more than one language for children, stood up to this challenge "in order to possess two languages, he must know how to compare concepts; And how will his sons compare while he is having trouble absorbing them?". Rousseau was wrong: it turns out that the need to compare abstract concepts actually helps their understanding and does not prevent it. This ability to look both from the inside and "outside" at the world has several consequences that go beyond grammar lessons. Thus, for example, the ability to understand irony, i.e. the gap between the dictionary meaning of a sentence and its opposite true intention, requires a distant view of the language itself and the context.
It is possible that the loss of ironic Jewish humor in Israel is not related to the disappearance of Yiddish, but rather to the Jews becoming monolingual. The ability to accommodate several points of view at the same time is also important in the development of social intelligence. An ability that appears between the ages of 3 and 4 is understanding the intentions and thoughts of others, children learn that what they know is not necessarily known to their friends. Social intelligence means looking at the world through the eyes of another person and portraying yourself as you appear from the outside. Bilingual children are better able to understand what others know or even what their friends think or know about other people's thoughts or information. The way to test this is by asking questions about other people's false beliefs.
A typical example is a story along the lines of "Yair, Yoav and Yael were playing, Yair and Yoav saw Yael hiding a ball in the red box, when Yair wasn't looking, Yael moved the ball to the green box" and the child has to answer the question where does Yoav think Yair thinks the ball is? The ability to answer such questions develops simultaneously with the development of language and there are areas of the brain that participate both in understanding language and in deciphering other people's thoughts and intentions. One hypothesis to explain the advantage of the linguistic rabbi is that the understanding that different things have different names in different people's mouths sharpens the need to know things from several perspectives.
It was found that the advantages of bilingualism, which are evident in immigrant children or in children growing up in communities of a distinct linguistic minority, are blurred in children growing up in a bilingual environment, i.e. when everyone speaks the same two languages, such as in Wales in Great Britain or the Basque Country in Spain. A child who grows up in Bilbao, Spain, where almost everyone speaks Basque and Spanish alternately and on different occasions, will acquire both languages, but the transition between Basque and Spanish will be similar to the transition between different stages of the same language in a monolingual child.
The necessity to use one of the two languages in each meeting forces the brain to develop the flexibility that characterizes bilingualism. But there are those who go further in the connection between language and social understanding. The psychologist Chyoko Kobayashi has published a series of studies based on the simulation of brain activity, including reinforcements for the claim that speakers of different languages use different thinking mechanisms to achieve reading the minds of others. For example, it turned out that this ability is weak among the speakers of the Quechua language of the Andean tribes, a language poor in verbs that describe modes of thought.
Kobayashi found differences between English- and Japanese-speaking subjects required for tasks of understanding the thoughts and beliefs of others: there was no difference in the degree of success but there was no complete overlap between the brain regions activated in each group. A possible and fascinating interpretation is that a different syntax directs us to a different way of analyzing and processing information. For example, people who grew up in a European culture are more inclined to attribute internal causes to behaviors and in Asian cultures people are more inclined to attribute environmental and external motives to explain and predict human actions. If we believe Kobayashi, then an additional language allows a person not only to practice and train complex thinking, but also provides him with a more diverse mental toolbox. Perhaps the 70 languages of the Sanhedrin were also 70 ways of understanding the world.
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You can also talk nonsense in Chinese Amharic and English
And there are idiots also in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Greece...also in Israel