The soundscape is the first thing you notice when you walk through any primary school in Brent or Tower Hamlets on a Wednesday morning. Bengali phrases tangled with English instructions, Polish nursery rhymes humming beneath corridor chatter, Somali siblings switching registers mid-sentence without missing a step. By all accounts, London is among the world’s most linguistically diverse cities. For years, a reassuring story about bilingual kids’ superior cognitive abilities followed that density around like a faithful dog. more acute. faster. Even smarter. As it happens, that tale might have been made up.
In a series of publications, including one in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Western University in Canada, under the direction of neuroscientist J. Bruce Morton and his colleague Cassandra Lowe, have argued that the so-called bilingual advantage in children is essentially a statistical ghost. Speaking two languages has no effect on children’s executive function once publication bias is taken into account, according to Morton’s analysis of 25 years of research. Not just a little over zero. not moving in the direction of importance. Nothing.
If you’re a parent in London who enrolled your child in a dual-language immersion program in part because you thought it would help them think more clearly, you may find the results somewhat upsetting. Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers performed better on attention tasks than their monolingual peers, according to a seminal 1999 paper published in Child Development, which seems to have been the foundation for an entire generation of educational marketing. Over eleven hundred citations have been made to that paper. However, the bilingual kids in the initial study were East Asian, and regardless of the number of languages they speak, East Asian preschoolers already tend to perform better on attention tests than their North American counterparts. This flaw was discovered by Morton’s team and is now almost embarrassingly obvious. Morton described the relationship between language status and country of origin as “perfectly confounded.”
The difference disappeared when his team compared East Asian monolingual and bilingual kids. Language had no bearing on either group’s superior performance over English-speaking monolinguals. A few carefully crafted comparisons exposed a quarter-century of confirmation bias.
All of this does not imply that bilingualism has no value at all. Growing up in London’s vast and complex social environment, children who learn two languages gain tangible benefits—just not the ones that most parents anticipated. Preschoolers who are bilingual seem to be more adept at interpreting the viewpoints of others, assigning intentions, and realizing that others may have knowledge that they do not. This is not so much intelligence as social fluency, according to psychologist Zsuzsi Papp, a researcher at Semmelweis University and mother of three bilingual children. Because they already experience partial comprehension on a daily basis, bilingual children are not lost when they come across a language they don’t fully understand.
The phoneme question is another. By the time they are six to eight months old, bilingual infants have developed a broader range of sound distinctions, creating what researchers refer to as a single neural network for both languages. Later on, learning a third or fourth language is made much simpler by this network, which functions subconsciously. In contrast, children who are monolingual typically develop distinct brain networks for every new language they come across—a more laborious architecture, if you will.
It’s possible that the true advantages of bilingualism were more difficult to measure, such as adaptability, comfort with ambiguity, and the natural ability to switch between social contexts and languages. Parents in London worry about confusion when they see their kids speaking Yoruba and English at the same time. The opposite is consistently demonstrated by research. Code-mixing is not random, but strategic. Even two-year-olds use different languages depending on the person they are speaking to. They borrow words from different languages in the same way that a resourceful traveler borrows directions—wherever it’s fastest.
Therefore, it’s unlikely that London’s bilingual kids are more intelligent in the conventional, test-score sense that parents and legislators once praised. However, they are developing flexibility that may never be fully captured by standardized measures as they navigate something truly complex on a daily basis. It seems that how narrowly you define intelligence determines whether or not that qualifies.
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