Bilingualism: The Negative Effects Of Bilingualism And The Language

Intelligence is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.’ (Wechsler, 1944, p. 3)
The effect of language on intelligence has long been debated. Educational psychologists reported the effects of language proficiency on intelligence but somehow their results are contradictory. Arsenian (1937) found no detrimental influence on mental ability and development by the acquisition of two languages. Bilingualism showed adverse effect on obtained IQ of bilinguals (Eichorn-Jones 1952), they suffer from language handicap in verbal intelligence test (Darcy 1953, 50). ), Spoerl found no difference in test scores among college students (Spoerl 1944).
Another

The general findings are bilingualism is a disadvantage for bilinguals when their intelligence is measured on verbal test of intelligence (Darcy 1953). Most of the studies suggested bilinguals as ‘home-school’ bilingual. Most of the children living in non- English societies are exposed to English at an age of six or seven. Their English remains limited to external settings. So they are most likely to score low in verbal intelligence as compared to those who speak English since infancy. Mostly the researchers ignored this fact and they considered bilinguals as verbal handicap (Sanchez 1923). Sanchez suggested that it was likely to raise the IQ's of Spanish-American children up to 100 scores from 72 in two years by intensive drill in English (Sanchez 1932a;

Participants were exposed to TOEFL, Raven Intelligence test, selected Cloze test and free writing test. There scores were analyzed using standard deviation and critical value of p. Hypothesis was verified using t test statistics. And she found that there is positive correlation in writing expression and IQ and no correlation in IQ and gender.
Hill, H. (1936) measured the effect of bilingualism on intelligence of elementary school children of Italian parentage. It was based on comparison of Italian children who used Italian at home with Italian children who use English on a variety of verbal and nonverbal tests. They had similar IQ. No differences were found between the two groups.
Johnson measured the relation between language and non- language intelligence tests and there and relationship between bilingualism and these tests via reaction-time tasks. Purpose of this study was to compare language and non-language tests of intelligence and how bilingualism relates to these two these tests. His stance was that these typical objective tests were not good enough to measure the intelligence of bilinguals because they were based on cultural nuances and without the strong command of language these tests could not be performed well. 30 Spanish boys (9 10 12 years old) in southwest US were tested. All boys used English in school but they had knowledge