The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Multilingualism

Charlemagne once said that “to have another language is to possess a second soul.” Over half of the world population speaks more than one language and around 25% of the world’s countries have two or more official languages. Multilingualism used to be viewed as a disadvantage – especially among children- since researches appeared to show that multilingual persons had more problems such as confusion language compared to a monolingual person. But for the past decades, studies actually started to show benefits that multilingualism brought such as the superiority of bilingual children and adults in performance on tasks requiring cognitive control and the resistance of bilingual brains to cognitive decline.

That’s why nowadays, scientists are more

Why is that ? That is what researchers tried to understand. First, it is important to distinguish two types of multilingual: the first is the one who is less proficient or acquired their foreign language later in life, in contrast with the second type who grew up with both languages. Indeed, the last category has shown similar emotional responses while asked emotional phrases, no matter the language used. In order to find the extent of multilingualism’s influence on one’s emotional or logical response, one method would be to examine the brain areas which control analytical and emotional processing, and especially the switch between the two corresponding to the switch between different languages. Cadwell-Harris in her article presents the study conducted by researchers at Chicago University: bilinguals were randomly asked to answer decision-making scenarios in either their native or foreign language. This experiment was also reproduced in other countries. Yet, the results were all similar: the polyglots chose rather logical decisions while using their foreign language, in contrast with choosing a more emotional decision, like gambling, while using their native language. Cadwell-Harris proposes a few other scientific studies such as surveys, which also

The only bad aspect this article could have is that it doesn’t give an humanistic, real life experiment, which is also what the author herself point out, leading to the non-conclusive ending. On the contrary, “Change of Language, Change of Personality” present scientific experiments, while linking it to the sociological and humanistic side of the phenomenon. But his conclusion is a strong negative aspect to the article. Indeed, the author is being too subjective as he reduces the scientific experiments and derives from their original results in order to give his hypothesis: he generalizes the cause of the phenomenon to the context of the studies, without taking in count the meticulous arrangement in which the researchers made sure to set up for the experiment. For example, in the study conducted by Professor David Luna, the subjects were carefully chose to be all Hispanic-American women, they were asked to give their opinion about an ad which was also picturing women, and the experiment has been replicated six months