Reading between the lines? Bilinguals do it better!

Being bilingual has some obvious advantages. Learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. However, in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function, which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities. Now, two new studies demonstrate that multilingual exposure improves not only cognitive skills but also social abilities. One study shows that multilingual can be better at communication than monolingual. If you think about it, this makes intuitive sense. Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. People in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content and the times and places in which different languages are spoken. They also found that who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language were just as talented as the bilingual at this task was. It seems that live in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.