# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Arriving at his Cardiff primary school aged five, the future vice-chancellor of Cambridge University had just one English phrase. Coached the previous evening by his Polish emigree parents, young Leszek Borysiewicz quickly tried out "Please can I go to the toilet?", before realising his classmates were only putting up their hands for registration.

At 63, the memory of that initial confusion remains, but so does the recollection of the dedication shown by teachers who taught the young Polish-speaker English, spending extra time after school or simply taking him for a walk and naming objects - grass, tree, stream.

Now, installed in one of the world's most influential academic posts after a career in medical research, Professor Borysiewicz is adamant that full bilingualism such as he acquired, far from being a problem, is an important asset, both for the individuals concerned and for the country where they grow up.

Conversely, he warns, the sharp decline in modern language study in the UK, especially in state schools serving disadvantaged areas, hampers efforts to widen participation in higher education among poorer students. Allowing learning languages to become the preserve of a privileged elite would be "absolutely wrong", the vice-chancellor told the Guardian.

Borysiewicz called for an end to the term "heritage languages" to describe the languages spoken alongside English by migrants to Britain and their descendants.

One in six children in English primary schools do not have English as a first language. "These are real languages: living languages that give people a huge insight into culture and give the children who can speak them additional opportunities.

"Isn't that what education is about - enabling every child to achieve the maximum potential? What I'd love to see is an emphasis that this is an added value that that child has, a talent, and we should aspire to allow other children who may be monolingual to strive to become as bilingual as they possibly can be."

Borysiewicz spoke Polish at home, with grammar reinforced at Saturday school run by volunteers in the Cardiff Polish community, but believes his English had reached the same standard before he reached secondary school age.

His parents, from eastern Poland, had been imprisoned in Siberian camps by the Russians at the start of the war, but after being freed in 1941 trekked through Russia, Iran and Iraq to Egypt, where they joined the British Eighth Army and fought in Italy. They chose to stay in Britain rather than return to communist Poland.

"My parents made very clear from almost day one that they felt that the future for my sister and myself was very much in Britain, and therefore I absolutely think the world of this country and what it stands for and I'm very proud of what Britain has achieved," said Borysiewicz, who describes his identity as Welsh and British, with an "affinity for Poland as the country of my parents' birth".

All the evidence suggested bilingualism gives "huge advantages", Borysiewicz added. "In an international world of tomorrow, I'd love to see more children in Britain having more than one language to be able to fall back on."

From September, primary schools in England will have to teach junior children - aged seven up - a second language, though concerns remain that many are ill-prepared to do so. However, the vice-chancellor said his own experience - speaking only Polish and then learning English from five - indicated that children should start a second language "the earlier the better", beginning in infant school.

Parental preferences and the "unfortunate reality" that many primary schools lacked teachers with language skills would dictate which languages should be taught, he added.

In a report last year, Languages: The State of the Nation, the British Academy found the UK was suffering from a "growing deficit" in language skills just as global demand for them was expanding. Britain is trapped in a "vicious circle of monolingualism" as a weak supply of language skills pushes down demand, said the study, though it suggested the additional languages spoken by ethnic-minority British schoolchildren would be a valuable source of skills if properly developed.

Language skills were needed at all levels of the workforce "and not simply by an internationally mobile elite", added the report.

Borysiewicz's concern that poorer children are losing access to language learning comes amid evidence that more than a quarter of state schools now do not teach lower-level students a language at all in order to give more time for extra literacy and numeracy support.

He said: "If secondary language education just focuses on some schools with greater capacity and facility that could impact on our ability in certain disciplines to continue the challenge of widening participation to many students."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bilingualism offers 'huge advantages', claims Cambridge University head

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Arriving at his Cardiff primary school aged five, the future vice-chancellor of Cambridge University had just one English phrase. Coached the previous evening by his Polish emigree parents, young Leszek Borysiewicz quickly tried out "Please can I go to the toilet?", before realising his classmates were only putting up their hands for registration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1922, in " Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see-and the more words there are, the better our perception. When we learn to speak a different language, we learn to see a bigger world.

Many modern language researchers agree with that premise. Not only does speaking multiple languages help us to communicate but bilingualism (or multilingualism) may actually confer distinct advantages to the developing brain. Because a bilingual child switches between languages, the theory goes, she develops enhanced executive control, or the ability to effectively manage what are called higher cognitive processes, such as problem-solving, memory, and thought. She becomes better able to inhibit some responses, promote others, and generally emerges with a more flexible and agile mind. It's a phenomenon that researchers call the bilingual advantage.

For the first half of the twentieth century, researchers actually thought that bilingualism put a child at a _dis_advantage, something that hurt her I.Q. and verbal development. But, in recent years, the notion of a bilingual advantage has emerged from research to the contrary, research that has seemed both far-reaching and compelling, much of it coming from the careful work of the psychologist Ellen Bialystok. For many tasks, including ones that involve working memory, bilingual speakers seem to have an edge. In a 2012 review of the evidence, Bialystok showed that bilinguals did indeed show enhanced executive control, a quality that has been linked, among other things, to better academic performance. And when it comes to qualities like sustained attention and switching between tasks effectively, bilinguals often come out ahead. It seems fairly evident then that, given a choice, you should raise your child to speak more than one language. Indeed, papers touting " Creativity and Bilingualism," " Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Five-Year-Olds," " A Bilingual Advantage in Task-Switching," " Bilingualism Reduces Native-Language Interference During Novel-Word Learning," and " Good Language-Switchers Are Good Task-Switchers"-and the resulting books with provocative titles such as " The Bilingual Edge" and " Bilingual Is Better "-suggest that raising a bilingual child is, in large part, a recipe for raising a successful child.

From the age of eleven, Angela de Bruin spoke two languages. Born in the nineteen-eighties in Nijmegen, a small town in the Netherlands, de Bruin spoke Dutch at home, and, in school, immersed herself in English. She became fascinated by bilinguals, and read avidly about the cognitive advantages that being fluent in more than one language was supposed to provide. In college, she took up linguistics and neuroscience. And, in 2012, de Bruin enrolled in the psychology graduate program at the University of Edinburgh to further pursue the link between bilingualism and cognition.

She came to the program fully expecting to study the extent to which her bilingual brain was adapted to succeed. "I had the impression that there's a really strong effect of bilingualism on executive function," de Bruin told me recently. Then, she carried out her first study. Normally, to test for an edge in executive function, you give a version of a task where people have to ignore certain stimuli while selectively focussing on others. For instance, in the commonly used Simon task, you are shown pictures (often arrows) on either the left or right side of a screen. If you see a right-pointing arrow, you press the right key. It doesn't matter on which side of the screen the arrow appears; the only thing that matters is the direction in which it points. Typically, people have faster reaction times on congruent trials-when the right-pointing arrow actually appears on the right, and vice-versa. Bilinguals are supposed to have an advantage in the incongruent trials: when the left arrow appears on the right, and the right arrow appears on the left.

When de Bruin looked at the data, though, in three of the four tasks testing inhibitory control, including the Simon task, the advantage wasn't there. Monolinguals and bilinguals had performed identically. "We thought, Maybe the existing literature is not a full, reliable picture of this field," she said. So, she decided to test it further.

Systematically, de Bruin combed through conference abstracts from a hundred and sixty-nine conferences, between 1999 and 2012, that had to do with bilingualism and executive control. The rationale was straightforward: conferences are places where people present in-progress research. They report on studies that they are running, initial results, initial thoughts. If there were a systematic bias in the field against reporting negative results-that is, results that show no effects of bilingualism-then there should be many more findings of that sort presented at conferences than actually become published.

That's precisely what de Bruin found. At conferences, about half the presented results provided either complete or partial support for the bilingual advantage on certain tasks, while half provided partial or complete refutation. When it came to the publications that appeared after the preliminary presentation, though, the split was decidedly different. Sixty-eight per cent of the studies that demonstrated a bilingual advantage found a home in a scientific journal, compared to just twenty-nine per cent of those that found either no difference or a monolingual edge. "Our overview," de Bruin concluded, "shows that there is a distorted image of the actual study outcomes on bilingualism, with researchers (and media) believing that the positive effect of bilingualism on nonlinguistic cognitive processes is strong and unchallenged."

De Bruin isn't refuting the notion that there are advantages to being bilingual: some studies that she reviewed really did show an edge. But the advantage is neither global nor pervasive, as often reported. After her meta-analysis was complete, de Bruin and her adviser ran an additional series of studies, which they have just submitted for publication, hoping to find where the limits of bilingual advantage lie, and what the real advantage may actually look like. To test for a possible boost, they examined three different groups (English monolinguals, active English-Gaelic bilinguals who spoke Gaelic at home, and passive English-Gaelic bilinguals who no longer used Gaelic regularly). They had each group take part in four tasks-the Simon task, a task of everyday attention (you hear different tones and must count the number of low ones while filtering out the high ones), the Tower of London (you solve a problem by moving discs around on a series of sticks to match a picture of what the final tower looks like), and a simple task-switching paradigm (you see circles and squares that are either red or blue, and must pay attention to either one color or one shape, depending on the part of the trial).

In the first three tasks, they found no difference between the groups. On the last, they thought they'd finally detected an advantage: on the switch trials-the trials immediately after a change from shape to color or color to shape-the bilinguals, both active and passive, seemed to be quicker. But when the researchers dug deeper, they found that it wasn't so much a case of switching faster as it was being slower at the non-switch trials, where shape followed shape and color followed color.

So does that mean that there's no such thing as a bilingual advantage? No. It's just one study. But it adds further evidence to the argument that the bilingual advantage is sometimes overstated. "I'm definitely not saying there's no bilingual advantage," de Bruin says. But the advantage may be different from the way many researchers have described it: as a phenomenon that helps children to develop their ability to switch between tasks and, more broadly, enhances their executive-control functions. The true edge, de Bruin believes, may come far later, and in a form that has little to do with task-switching and executive control; it may, she says, be the result of simple learning.

One of the areas where the bilingual advantage appears to be most persistent isn't related to a particular skill or task: it's a general benefit that seems to help the aging brain. Adults who speak multiple languages seem to resist the effects of dementia far better than monolinguals do. When Bialystok examined the records for a group of older adults who had been referred to a clinic in Toronto with memory or other cognitive complaints, she found that, of those who eventually developed dementia, the lifelong bilinguals showed symptoms more than four years later than the monolinguals. In a follow-up study, this time with a different set of patients who had developed Alzheimer's, she and her colleagues found that, regardless of cognitive level, prior occupation, or education, bilinguals had been diagnosed 4.3 years later than monolinguals had. Bilingualism, in other words, seems to have a protective effect on cognitive decline. That would be consistent with a story of learning: we know that keeping cognitively nimble into old age is one of the best ways to protect yourself against dementia. (Hence the rise of the crossword puzzle.) When the brain keeps learning, as it seems to do for people who retain more than one language, it has more capacity to keep functioning at a higher level.

That, in and of itself, is reason enough to learn a second, third, fourth, or fifth language-and to keep learning them as long as you're able. The bilingual advantage may not appear in the exact guise researchers think of it today. But, on a fundamental level, bilingualism's real benefits could be far more important.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1922, in " Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see-and the more words there are, the better our perception.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The ability to speak more than one language certainly has its perks. It enables you to work in another country, for example, interact with people while travelling, or consume foreign media.

Bilingualism is very common - current estimates are that more than half of the world's population is bilingual and that this prevalence is rising.

Cognitive psychologists have been interested in how bilingualism shapes the mind for almost a century. There are those who suggest that in order to speak in one language, bilinguals have to suppress the influence of the other. Research from the past three decades has argued that this unique form of language processing "trains the brain" in the use of non-verbal abilities known as " executive functions " such as ignoring irrelevant information or shifting attention.

Bilinguals of different ages and cultural backgrounds have been shown to be faster and more accurate than their monolingual peers when performing cognitive tasks demanding these abilities. Furthermore, it has been argued that bilingualism may lead to a delayed onset of symptoms associated with dementia.

But the scientific community recently has become increasingly sceptical of the bilingual advantage hypothesis. One of the main points of criticism is that differences between monolinguals and bilinguals when it comes to executive function are not always apparent. This has generated a heated debate, especially in the Bilingualism Forum of the scientific journal Cortex, about whether bilingualism is associated with cognitive advantages or not.

Fresh challenge

It appears that research on bilingualism is at a turning point. We need to pursue a new approach to understand, beyond those individual examples of executive functions, how the bilingual mind works. We have attempted to address this challenge by testing whether bilinguals and monolinguals differ in terms of how accurately they can assess their own performance.

This ability is called metacognition and is associated with, but separate from, other areas where bilinguals have been shown to have an advantage. Surprisingly, however, we found that bilinguals had less insight into their performance than their monolingual peers.

Joining the dots

In an effort to find out whether bilinguals also display advantages in other cognitive abilities (beyond executive function), we evaluated metacognitive processing in young adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Metacognition is the ability to evaluate one's own cognitive performance or simply to have "thoughts about thoughts".

This ability is a crucial function of everyday life, when we have to make decisions where the outcomes are not immediate. For example, when an entrepreneur reviews their company's performance, they need to take into account a variety of factors - including, for example, revenues and expenses - in order to evaluate whether the company is doing well. Confidence in their ideas and performance can be the determining factor in whether they decide to keep investing time in their company or give up and apply for another job (the so-called " exploitation exploration trade-off ").

In our research, we presented participants with a situation in which they had to observe two circles on a screen and guess which one contained more dots. Sometimes the difference was obvious, making the decision easy, while at other times the decision was very difficult (for example, one circle contained 50 dots and the other 49). Participants were then asked to determine how confident they were in their decision on a scale from less to more confident than normal.

Folkes et al, 2016, Author provided

Over the course of two experiments, we found that bilinguals and monolinguals were equally likely to choose the circle containing the highest number of dots. However, monolinguals were better able than bilinguals to discriminate between when they were right and when they were wrong. In other words, bilinguals had less insight into their performance than monolinguals. This went against our initial predictions, as we expected to find a bilingual advantage in metacognitive processing. These results indicate that bilingualism may be associated with cognitive disadvantages as well as benefits.

What's next?

The Multilanguage & Cognition lab (MULTAC) at Anglia Ruskin University is currently undertaking a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to enhance our understanding of the bilingual mind.

The lab has already published evidence of cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism, suggesting that bilinguals are better at filtering out verbal interference as well as visual attention, specifically spotting the difference in a visuo-spatial working memory task.

This new research indicates that bilingual people may experience a disadvantage in metacognition. We hope that this new direction in bilingualism research will encourage further attention and enable us to resolve theoretical debate through the adoption of open-minded, empirically driven exploration of cognitive effects (both positive and negative) that may be associated with learning more than one language.
Julia Ouzia, PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, Anglia Ruskin University and Tomas Folke, PhD candidate, University of Cambridge This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the conversation the conversation tomas folke tomas folke bilingualism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
cognition school of the biological sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
-department of psychology department of psychology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion: There are also drawbacks to being bilingual

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The ability to speak more than one language certainly has its perks. It enables you to work in another country, for example, interact with people while travelling, or consume foreign media. Bilingualism is very common - current estimates are that more than half of the world's population is bilingual and that this prevalence is rising.

# data[].attributes.body
Disadvantages of bilingualism discussed in one section of the article