The Benefits of Being Bilingual

A According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual.

B Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we do not hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear can, you will likely activate words like candy and candle as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called language co-activation, comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to "pick up a marker" from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who does not know Russian, because the Russian word for "stamp", marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, "marker". In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language.

C Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase "tip-of-the-tongue states", when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match, for example the word red printed in red, people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word do not match, for example the word red printed in blue. This occurs because the word itself and its font colour conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorising objects by colour, such as red or green, to categorising them by shape, such as circle or triangle, they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.

D It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain-stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception.

E Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focusing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.

F Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during ageing. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over 200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behaviour and abilities were the same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same amount of fuel.

G Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule they had learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far beyond language.

Flower Power

27 A Why do people give flowers? They may do so to offer condolence to those who are grieving, to express gratitude, or to ask for forgiveness. There is something undeniably powerful about giving flowers; indeed, few objects provoke such a universal response. In the United States alone, the flower industry is now worth about $5 billion a year, suggesting, at the very least, that flowers serve a compelling human need.

28 B Research at the Department of Psychology at Rutgers State University of New Jersey confirms that flowers are unique among living organisms in their ability to induce changes in our emotional state. As the first part of their research, the Rutgers psychologists studied women in their homes. Each was presented with a variety of gifts such as flowers, fruit or sweets. The women were unaware that the study was about the effect of gifts on their emotions. They were told that it was a study about their daily moods and that they would receive a gift in return for taking part. Following the presentation of the gifts, women receiving flowers were assessed as displaying a much more positive mood than those who received other gifts, and this effect lasted for several days. After receiving flowers, participants were more willing to answer questions concerning their social circle and intimate relationships with friends and family. The results suggest that flowers influence our emotional behaviour, as well as having a strong effect on our immediate expression.

29 C In the second study, the psychologists observed participants being handed single flowers, or no gift at all, in a constrained and stressful situation: inside an elevator. Contrary to expectations regarding gender differences, both men and women presented with flowers were more likely to smile, to stand closer and to initiate conversation. Several subjects who were initially sceptical about the experiment’s purpose then learnt that flowers were also being handed out, and returned to the elevator to demand one. The scientists used elevators for this study precisely because typical behaviour in sparsely occupied elevators is for people to retreat to opposite corners. The subjects who received flowers, however, closed up that space to a considerable extent, indicating that the flowers not only induced a strong positive mood but also created a significant sense of affiliation among people who had never previously met.

30 D The third study involved regularly sending flowers to a selected sample of men and women. The researchers found not only a profound elevation of mood but also reliable improvements in other measures of cognitive function, such as memory. In this series of experiments, some participants produced such extraordinary emotional displays that the psychologists were totally unprepared for them. Subjects gave spontaneous hugs and kisses to the people who delivered the flowers, and sent invitations to the psychologists to come to their homes for refreshments.

31 E Various evolutionary hypotheses attempt to explain the remarkably powerful psychological effect of flowers. One is that our aesthetic preferences for fertile locations and growing things stem from prehistory, when these clues in our environment could mean the difference between starvation and survival. We may have become hardwired to respond positively to flowers because, for early humans, finding them in a particular location predicted future food supplies and possibly a better place to rear children. Yet the flaw in this argument is that the showy flowers which humans seem to find most visually attractive are generally found on plants that yield no edible products.

32 F The Rutgers psychologists’ findings show that the various physical attributes of flowers combine to directly affect our emotions through multi-channel interactions. We have evolved preferences for particular colours, textures, patterned symmetries and specific floral odours which influence our moods. Indeed, previous research has established that popular perfumes, which often have a floral "top-note", may reduce depression. The origins of these inclinations may well be as evolutionary theories suggest: the patterned symmetries of flowers can be detected easily as a recognisable signal within a wide variety of visual arrays, and a response to certain colour tones is important in finding ripe fruit against a leafy background. But, according to the Rutgers team, these preferences have long been separated from their primary evolutionary use and have become rewarding to us more generally. Thus, plants with preferred colours, shapes and odours, despite having no other products, would therefore be protected and dispersed.

33 G The Rutgers study suggests that flowers may actually have evolved to exploit their unusual impact on humans. The team’s theory proposes a plant-human co-evolution, or even domestication, based on the intense emotional rewards that flowers provide. The idea that flowering plants, with no known food or other basic survival value to humans, have co-evolved with us by exploiting an emotional niche is very similar to the scenario proposed for the evolution of dogs. Flowers may be the plant equivalent of companion animals. If this is true, then there is a real sense in which, when you next give flowers, they are using you just as much as you are using them.