Language in Psychology and the ‘bilingual advantage’

Two recent pieces in The Psychologist dealt with bilingualism and multilingualism – subjects that, with some important exceptions, have not received due attention in psychology, particularly social psychology.

Last September, David Sher criticised the 'monolingual approach' which leads to autistic children being discouraged from learning their family's community (or 'heritage') language alongside English. Parents were told by doctors that two languages for these children would 'complicate things', but Sher pointed to a lack of evidence that bilingualism is harmful. In fact, he adds, expansion of the linguistic repertoire may contribute to positive outcomes for the children, as well as strengthening familial cohesion. He went on to discuss the benefits of bilingualism for everyone and to criticise the many settings in which it has been restricted or stifled. He cited the forced monolingualism and the active disdain (or worse) for 'small' languages in many parts of the world – from aboriginal varieties in settler societies like Canada and Australia to indigenous languages like Welsh. For a longer exposition of his argument, see Sher et al. (2022). 

Then in the November issue, responding to Sher's argument, Arwyn Reynolds broadened the picture. In the Welsh bilingual community in which he grew up there was no explicit pressure, perhaps, but he reported the common belief that bilingualism was confusing to children and a hindrance to mobility.

To turn first to bilingualism vis-à-vis developmental disorders, I should point out that, despite Sher's assertion of limited research attention, there is a relevant psychological literature. In a seminal (though not the first) discussion, Genesee (1976) argued that language-immersion programmes (French-English in this case) were indeed suitable for children with disabilities, a thesis he greatly expanded in 2007. The most recent comprehensive treatments are those of Paradis et al.(2021) and Sánchez López et al. (2022), and I have made one or two general commentaries (see Edwards 2019, 2020).  A succinct and accurate summary came from Paradis and Govindarajan (2018, p.364):

Children with language and communication disorders like SLI [specific language impairment] and ASD [autism spectrum disorder] clearly have the capacity to become bilingual and, for children who speak a heritage L1 [first language] at home, continued bilingual development post diagnosis is the best recommendation for the child's social-emotional well-being within his/her family.

A summary is all that was necessary for me to provide here, since the information bearing upon bilingualism and developmental disorders is a specific offshoot of a wider literature. Even though the world has always been full of bilingual (and multilingual) people, those who spoke only one language were seen as the most appropriate for concentrated study in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Monolingualism was somehow the 'natural' linguistic arrangement. Furthermore, it was often felt that learning a second language might lessen the potential for learning other things.  Early in his partnership with Watson, Sherlock Holmes explained his ignorance of many things by saying that the brain was like an attic, that one should fill it wisely according to one's needs, and that 'it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent'.

This sort of finite-capacity assertion was common. John Firth, the first person to hold a chair in linguistics in Britain, wrote that 'the average bilingual speaker ... has two strings to his bow' but, since one of them is 'rather slacker than the other ... the unilingual have the advantage' (Firth, 1970, p.211). The noted Danish philologist Otto Jespersen – proficient himself in several languages – felt that learning a second language might lessen the potential for learning other things (see Jespersen, 1922).

The flood of people into North America in the early 20th century highlighted longstanding prejudices and stereotypes, whilst also reinforcing the idea that there was something undesirable about multilingualism – and, more specifically, about immigrants who spoke little or no English. Heavily biased tests and interviews indicated a relationship between the many languages they brought with them and 'feeble-mindedness'. Not surprisingly, this handicap was found to be more prevalent among southern and eastern Europeans than in those from the north and west. It is sad to think that the intelligence-testing movement that underpinned such assessments signalled the first significant presence of the fledgling social science of psychology. Florence Goodenough (1926, p.393), a colleague of Lewis Terman, wrote that 'the use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation'.

Scholars themselves were, of course, exempt from such asessments. When the mathematician Henri Poincaré lectured in Göttingen in 1929, he spoke in French and, in that same year, Sigmund Freud spoke in German at Clark University. In both cases, most of the audience were able to understand. It is not inaccurate to say that most of those who were rounding on the languages of those huddled masses were bilingual or better themselves. Negative assessments of bilingualism were coloured with class and ethnic prejudices, as, indeed, were those of accent and dialect differences. Thus, Henry Wyld, the Merton professor of English, argued that the sounds of RP were intrinsically better than those found in 'provincial and other dialects'. The best RP, he asserted, was found among British (Regular) Army officers, and any admixture of provincial accents or ordinary city speech included 'plain vulgarisms' which one could only 'dispraise' (1934, p.605, 614).  (Recent reports reveal what everyone still knows: there are hierarchies of accents with very real consequences: see Levon et al., 2020, 2022).

A generation on, Peal and Lambert (1962) prefaced their study of bilingual and monolingual children in Montreal by noting that the bulk of previous research had found negative relationships between bilingualism and intelligence. Their more careful investigation indicated, however, that  bilingual children did better on both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests: they exhibited 'mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, and a more diversified set of mental abilities' (p.20). The authors were nonetheless obliged to point to the knotty problem of causal direction, and cautionary notes typically accompanied later work, too.

Apart from the 'directional' problem, how might different levels of bilingual proficiency affect results? Could simple measures of socioeconomic status fully and accurately equate home backgrounds? What of varying motivational levels? And so on. Many of these matters have been attended to in the most recent research, a significant body of which has indeed supported a positive relationship between expanded linguistic repertoires and important aspects of cognitive functioning. With many different language pairs having now been studied, a 'bilingual advantage' in terms of problem-solving, reasoning, planning and general cognitive flexibility is frequently reported. In short, many researchers in the area have come to accept that adding languages improves cognitive abilities. 

There remain serious difficulties in the extrapolations often made from this research. It is workshop-based rather than ethnographic. Most of the participants form a rather special subset of the population: they live in 'developed' societies, they are literate and educated, they are relatively well-off, and their abilities, either present or nascent, tend to stand out. While most people around the world are bilingual or better, there seems not to be any great evidence linking these expanded fluencies with greater basic knowledge or insight. As social-scientific scholars have found with many other topics, it is hard to bring the complexities of real life into testing sites.  

The important point, though, is simply that – whether or not bilingualism per se confers cognitive benefits – the best contemporary scholarship shows that the development of expanded language competence(s) is a good and useful thing, and without any intrinsic negative consequences; a recent broad overview can be found in Edwards (2023).

These matters have largely to do with aspects of experimental cognitive psychology. Attention to the features that are central to all aspects of what might be termed the 'social life of language' – not just where expanded linguistic repertoires are concerned – remains rather peripheral in mainstream social psychology, however. There is a literature on the social psychology of language, to be sure, it has reached the point where handbooks and other anthologies have now appeared, and there is a journal (only one) that is devoted to the area. But trawling through social psychology textbooks or (say) the British Journal of Social Psychology reveals the state of affairs. This, despite the impact that Henri Tajfel's seminal work on social identity has had over the past three decades or so. Much of the investigation that has followed has paid little attention to the obvious contribution that language makes to both individual and group identity.

There are some clear exceptions to this – notably in the area of language attitudes, stereotypes and their implications – but Peter Robinson, whose 1972 monograph was seen by some as the first focused psychological approach to the 'social life of language', was obliged to later point out that 'systematic study of the social psychology of language' was still underdeveloped, and that relatively few researchers gave it specialist attention (Robinson & Locke, 2011, p.47). His observation about the surprising neglect of such a central feature of all human life was not new, however. Interested readers are referred to the still relevant article by Kroger and Wood (1992), in which the authors emphasised 'the centrality of language for the understanding of social life' and the inherent reciprocity: 'the social creates language and language creates the social' (pp.584-585).

Danziger's (1983) account of what happened (or, rather, what failed to happen) after the 1860 appearance of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft makes interesting reading, particularly the influence this journal had on the production of the ten-volume Völkerpsychologie (1900-1920) – the author of which was none other than Wilhelm Wundt.  Had the behaviourist turn in psychology been neither so sharp nor so all-embracing, one imagines that the social psychology of language might now be a more salient part of the larger social exercise. At the end of their article, Kroger and Wood predicted greater attention, however, noting postmodern and constructionist trends. Within these, it is true, we find attention given to discourse analysis and its several 'critical' offshoots. However, as I have argued elsewhere, much of the treatment found there, while certainly social in nature, cannot be seen as social-scientific(Edwards, 2022). The way remains open for the more rigorous scrutiny that experimental and applied social psychology has historically provided.

John Edwards, FBPsS, FRSC

Senior Research Professor, St Francis Xavier University

Adjunct Professor (Graduate Studies), Dalhousie University

REFERENCES

Danziger, K. (1983). Origins and basic principles of Wundt's Völkerpsychologie. British Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 303-313.

Edwards, J. (2019). Multilingual individuals. In David Singleton and Larissa Aronin (eds), Twelve Lectures on Multilingualism, pp. 135-161. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Edwards, J. (2020). Towards multilingualism. Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, 1, 23-43.

Edwards, J. (2022). Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: Disorders of our time. Sociolinguistica: European Journal of Sociolinguistics, 36, 55-68.

Edwards, J. (2023). Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity.  London: Bloomsbury.

Firth, J. (1970). The Tongues of Men and Speech. London: Oxford University Press [Speech and The Tongues of Men were first published, separately, in 1930 and 1937, respectively.]

Genesee, F. (1976). The suitability of French immersion programs for all children. Canadian Modern Language Review, 32, 494-515.

Goodenough, F. (1926). Racial differences in the intelligence of school children. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 9, 388-397.

Jespersen, O. (1922). Language. London: Allen & Unwin.

Kroger, R. & Wood, L. (1992). Whatever happened to language in social psychology? A survey of texts. Canadian Psychology, 33, 584-594.

Levon, E., Sharma, D., Watt, D. & Perry, C. (2020). Accent Bias in Britain. London: Queen Mary University / York: University of York.

Levon, E., Sharma, D. & Ilbury, C. (2022). Speaking Up: Accents and Social Mobility.  London: Sutton Trust.

Paradis, J. & Govindarajan, K. (2018). Bilingualism and children with developmental language and communication disorders. In David Miller, Fatih Bayram, Jason Rothman and Ludovica Serratrice (eds), Bilingual Cognition and Language, pp. 347-370. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Paradis, J., Genesee, F. & Crago, M. (2021). Dual Language Development and  Disorders (3rd edition).  Baltimore: Brookes.

Peal, E. & Lambert, W. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence.  Psychological Monographs, 76(27), 1-23.

Robinson, P. (1972).  Language and Social Behaviour.  Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Robinson, P. & Locke, A. (2011). The social psychology of language: A short history. In Raj Mesthrie (ed.), Handbook of Sociolinguistics, pp. 47-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sher, D., Gibson, J. & Browne, W. (2022). "It's like stealing what should be theirs": An exploration of the experiences and perspectives of parents and educational practitioners on Hebrew-English bilingualism for Jewish autistic children. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52, 4440-4473.

Sánchez López, C., Young, T., Genesee, F. & Hilliard, J. (2022).  Welcoming Bilingual Learners with Disabilities into Dual Language Programs.  Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wundt, W. (1910-1920). Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann.

Wyld, H. (1934).  The Best English: A Claim for the Superiority of Received Standard English. Oxford: Society for Pure English. [Tract 39]