Introduction to the special issue on cognitive consequences of bilingualism
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EDITORIAL
Introduction to the special issue on cognitive consequences of bilingualism Ramesh Mishra . Jubin Abutalebi
Published online: 19 October 2020 Ó Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
The relationship between bilingualism and general cognitive abilities has recently attracted considerable attention. A central idea in this regard is that bilinguals’ cognitive abilities may be boosted as a consequence of that they have to deal with two (or more) languages most of the time. ‘Managing’ two or more languages, for instance, may require some explicit or implicit inhibition of the context inappropriate language. The exact mechanisms of such cognitive and neural processing in bilinguals and its general consequences are hotly debated. One reason for this appears to be political. In some countries, such as the United States, the notion that bilingualism has detrimental effects on child development had been widespread. As a reaction to this widely held false belief, many language researchers in North America set out to collect experimental evidence to investigate the issue experimentally and correct such claims. Interestingly, this body of research obtained many results that suggested that bilingualism bestows enhanced abilities on the bilingual (especially with regard to cognitive control, e.g. Bialystok and Craik 2010; Emmorey et al. (2008) rather than
R. Mishra (&) Hyderabad, India e-mail: [email protected] J. Abutalebi Milan, Italy
detrimental effects as had previously been thought. This brings us to the second controversy, namely, that many of the cognitive advantages could not be replicated (e.g. von Bastian et al. 2016) and were subsequently re-evaluated as reflecting false positives or publication bias by some researchers (e.g., De Bruin et al. 2015; Nichols et al. 2020). We will not attempt to take a stance either way in this editorial. Two things however are important to realise. First, researchers on both sides agree that learning a second language (or more) is good for people simply because it allows bilinguals and multilinguals to engage (and often) embrace another language community and culture. The old idea that learning another language is bad for you is no longer shared by any serious researcher. Second, the whole controversy is very much a result of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic, cf. Muthukrishna et al. 2020) psychology. In countries such as India, almost everybody (i.e. almost one billion people) speaks multiple languages, the notion that multilingualism may be bad for you, had indeed been considered more than a little weird. This was the background when in November 2018 Ramesh Mishra (University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad) and Veeky Baths (BITS Pilani Goa Campus, Goa) invited leading bilingualism researchers from across the world to take part in a workshop on the issue of cognitive consequences of bilingualism. This special issue is a result of the fruitful discussions that happened at this workshop. One of the most ins
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