What is the Bilingual Advantage?

How being bilingual can help you and your brain.

François Grosjean published a paper in the 1980s with the title “Neurolinguists Beware—The Bilingual Is Not Two Monolinguals In One!” And in that paper, he included a famous analogy that shows why comparing bilinguals to monolinguals is unfair.

He said to picture a bilingual as a high hurdler—those athletes that run and then jump over beams. Also picture two sets of monolinguals: one set of sprinters and one set of high jumpers.

In the sports world, would it be fair to take the running speed of the high hurdler and compare it to the sprinters? Similarly, would it be fair to take the height of the jumps and compare it with the high jumpers? No and no.

There are some similarities between the high hurdlers and the sprinters/ high jumpers. But they’re completely different sports. It would be completely unfair to make these comparisons.

The same idea holds for bilinguals. At the most basic level of comparison, bilinguals have two languages in their minds. Monolinguals don’t. And that changes things.

Another visual: If there’s a bilingual baby who knows 20 words in Spanish and 10 in English, that baby knows 30 words total. But if you compare the number of words they know in each language, they know fewer words than the monolingual babies. For example, the bilingual baby only knows 10 words in English, while the monolingual baby knows 25. This looks bad for the bilingual baby. But just how comparing the running speed of a high hurdler against the speed of a sprinter is unfair because it doesn’t take into account the skills of the high hurdler, comparing bilinguals to monolinguals doesn’t take into account their overall capabilities.

In this newsletter, we’re going to discuss how bilingual brains operate differently and how speaking multiple languages can affect our brains.

The Bilingual Advantage

Being bilingual has several social and communicative advantages. You can talk to more people. You can apply to more job opportunities. You can consume more content. But that’s not what linguists are talking about when they talk about the bilingual advantage. They’re talking about bilinguals having greater executive function capabilities.

What is Executive Function?

Directly behind your forehead is the frontal lobe of your brain. The frontal lobe is connected to several other parts of the brain and is described as, “the conductor of the brain’s orchestra,” because it tells other parts of the brain to work together.

Executive function relates to skills in the frontal lobe of your brain that include planning, following instructions, multitasking, and focus.

Do Bilinguals Have Better Executive Function Skills?

It’s controversial. But here’s the idea behind these studies:

When you’re bilingual, all languages you speak are always “online” in your brain. If you’re a Spanish and English bilingual, your Spanish is activated when you’re speaking English and vice versa. So, when a bilingual is speaking any language, their brain has to operate differently than a monolingual. It has to constantly tell the other language(s) “shh it’s not your turn.” In other words, bilinguals are forever in multitasking mode telling one language to flow and the other language to chill.

So, since they’re always working on a key executive function skill, are they better at it than monolinguals?

It depends. Different studies have different designs. For example, the Stroop Test is a common task used in these studies. You can try it out yourself. Read the color of the word (not what the word says) as quickly as possible:

The Stroop Test is one of many tasks that researchers may use. And different tasks test for different parts of executive function (some focus on concentration, others on ability to switch between tasks). For that reason, you can find hundreds of articles that say the bilinguals advantage exists. And hundreds of articles that say the bilingual advantage does not exist.

That’s why it’s really helpful to look at meta-studies that tell us the general trends that appear in the research. Ware et al. (2020) analyzed 170 studies on the bilingual advantage and found some interesting trends:

They found that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on four out of seven tasks. Since executive function is an umbrella term that relates to everything from concentration to switching between tasks, it may be that the bilingual advantage exists for certain parts of executive function.

For example, bilinguals did better than monolinguals on the Attentional Network Task (ANT) across all the studies. You can try it out. You’ll see arrows on the screen. Your job is to focus on the arrow in the center. Ignore everything except for the center arrow. If it’s pointing left, say left. If it’s pointing right, say right. I recommend starting the video around 2:25. But note that it’s going at the speed of the person who’s recording the video.

The processes associated with the ANT seem to be highly related to the bilingual advantage, as bilinguals across all studies completed the ANT with faster reaction times than monolinguals. According to Ware et al. (2020), this could mean that the bilingual advantage specifically deals with superior attention.

Age & The Bilingual Advantage

The meta-study found that participants in the group aged 30-49 consistently showed a bilingual advantage. Even though the advantage wasn’t large, it was consistent.

There was an age group in which the advantage in terms of response time was rather large: participants over the age of 50. It appears that the bilingual advantage becomes more pronounced as we age older.

To explain this finding, Ware et al. (2020) said that executive function is at its peak for younger people (ages 18-29). However, as people grow older, their command of their executive function gradually declines. It seems like that decline is faster for monolinguals than bilinguals, who are constantly using executive function skills when they’re speaking.

Conclusion

There are many studies that show that being bilingual helps you as you grow older. In addition to retaining your executive function skills longer, research has shown that the onset of dementia is later for bilinguals than monolinguals (by around five years!).

By doing the mental gymnastics of using one language at a time (or switching between two), you’re practicing executive function skills without even realizing it. So, in addition to the social and communicative benefits of bilingualism, you’re also strengthening cognitive skills—like attention—which extend far beyond language.

Discussion

I’d love to know your thoughts! Let me know by commenting below (paid subscribers) or replying to the email:

1. Did you know about the bilingual advantage before?

2. Does it change the way you view bilingualism?

Works Cited

Grosjean, F. (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and language, 36(1), 3-15.

Ware AT, Kirkovski M, Lum JAG. Meta-Analysis Reveals a Bilingual Advantage That Is Dependent on Task and Age. Front Psychol. 2020 Jul 24;11:1458. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01458. PMID: 32793026; PMCID: PMC7394008.