Question

Explain why research comparing the IQ of bilinguals and monolinguals during the period of detrimental effects led to incorrect conclusions about the cognitive impact of blingualism. Also, explain how these problems were fixed during the period of additive effects.

Answer 1

Rsearch on bilingual individuals was varied but with a specific pattern of conclusions, namely that being bilingual was detrimental to a child's linguistic and cognitive development, and put the individual at a disadvantage compared to monolingual peers. The general opinion was that bilinguals would have smaller vocabularies, stunted general cognitive abilities and that children learning two languages from a young age would be spending too much of their energy differentiating and building the two languages to become competent in either one.

Studies referred to the "problem of bilingualism" the "handicapping influence of bilingualism"^[6] and reported that bilinguals performed worse in IQ tests, had smaller vocabularies, and suffered in most aspects of language development, as revealed mostly through verbal IQ tests. These studies suffered from several methodological problems that undermined the soundness of their conclusions.  raising the concern that there is no way of determining whether their samples were truly representative of a bilingual population; they did not control for socioeconomic status; and many of them administered verbal-intelligence tests to non-proficient speakers of a second language in that second language.

The literature has consistently found advantages of bilinguals over matched monolingual peers in several aspects of language development and ability, as well as in more general areas of aptitude such as perception and executive functioning.