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Bilingualism and IntelligenceAs a first step we should consider what people have said about bilingualism. There has always been a fear in this country (an in other monolingual countries like the USA) that people who had to deal with two languages would somehow be impaired. It was thought that if you tried to have too many languages the brain would be overloaded and a child would be behind in their development. So people have been suspicious of simultaneous bilingualism where the child is exposed to two languages at the same time. If it were possible for a child to live in two languages at once equally well, so much the worse. His intellectual and spiritual growth would not thereby be doubled but halved. Unity of mind and character would have great difficulty in asserting itself in such circumstances. Laurie, 1890, quoted in Baker, p 107. This was used as an argument against Welsh so that children should not be confused by having the languages alongside one another. The results of the programmes found that although there were periods where the growth of two languages together was slower than the growth of one on its own, there were no long term effects and the result was usually that the children were more aware of languages. According to Baker the period of negative thinking lasted from the early 19th century until the 1960s. A good deal of the research was carried out on immigrant groups and early findings in the 20th century tended to suggest that these groups were negatively affected – however, the trauma of refugee/immigrant status probably played major role – as well as the rather unfavourable methodology where interpreters were used and the contexts were unfavourable to the incoming bilinguals. Another strand of the research was to try to assess the extent of English used at home – where this was low, the findings tended to show that the child performed more poorly in school – which in turn was used as an argument in the bilingualism debate. Goodenough (1926) suggested that this circumstance of use of a foreign language was a major factor in producing mental retardation. Saer (1924) in a study of Welsh bilinguals also concluded that lower IQ was the result of bilingualism – although this seemed to be based on the finding that rural (not urban) children tested were lower. There were some contradictory results. Malherbe(1946) is a study of 18,000 pupils in South Africa showed that the bilinguals performed better. There was research on this topic but Baker dismisses it as invalid or he challenges the nature of intelligence itself. He says that intelligence is more than the paper and pencil exercises which have been used. These do not take into account the enriching effects of the languages. Baker lists factors of the language of the testing, the accuracy of the statistical analysis, the classification, the generalisation of the results, the context of whether it is additive or subtractive and finally the issue of matched groups whether the groups compared are the same in all factors other than bilingualism. Baker claims that this period of negative views of bilingualism was followed by a period when there were neutral results. Finally there were positive results which he considers to have begun to published in 1962. This study by Peal & Lambert, had some flaws but discovered that bilingual children were better in intelligence on 15 out of 18 measures used. Since then there have been many more studies which have found that were positive results. Most of these are in the education area and we will examine these later. |
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