When kindergarten decisions for New York City’s public schools go out this week, thousands of parents will furiously refresh their inboxes, hoping for an offer from one of the city’s popular dual-language programs. To some, the growing demand for dual-language education among American parents is cause for celebration; to others, it’s a pernicious new form of gentrification. As a speech and language scientist who is currently trying to raise a child in two languages, I wonder if well-intentioned researchers have exacerbated this conflict by overhyping the cognitive benefits of bilingual education—and if we could help parents understand that the true value of bilingualism is not a bigger brain but a broader mind.
In recent years, dual-language programs have acquired a reputation as “the new gifted and talented”: oases of educational opportunity in an increasingly shaky public school system. Because these programs have limited capacity, higher demand means that someone will inevitably be left out, and unsurprisingly, the families with the most financial resources typically elbow out the less privileged. In this case, many of the students losing access to bilingual education are those who speak another language, usually Spanish, in the home—children coming from the very families these programs were supposed to serve in the first place.
What is driving achievement-oriented parents to pursue schooling for their children in a language they don’t speak or have cultural ties to? Everyone can appreciate the additional opportunities created for a person who speaks and reads two languages fluently. However, the brain plasticity that enables young children to quickly absorb a second language also allows languages to be lost if bilingual exposure ceases after the elementary years. But many parents are unperturbed by the idea that the school language may not stick with their little one. “Supposedly just the exposure to a second language makes little brains grow, whether or not they acquire the target language,” commented one parent in a Facebook group.
Remarks like this show that parents are aware of the body of research claiming that a bilingual upbringing can give children an edge in cognitive domains that extend beyond language—especially executive function, the constellation of skills that underlies the ability to direct attention, regulate our own behavior, and solve complex problems. Children are known for their limited executive function: The prefrontal cortex, considered the seat of cognitive control, will not finish developing until the late teens or even the early 20s. A number of behavioral patterns that are typical of toddlers (and sometimes teens), such as impulsive behavior, short attention span, and difficulty transitioning from one activity to another, are emblematic of their reduced capacity for executive control. Strengthening this domain seems like a winning strategy to give a young child an edge in school and beyond.
The most prominent name in research on bilingual advantages in cognitive function is Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. In an influential 1999 study, Bialystok compared bilingual and monolingual preschoolers in tasks that assess executive function, such as sorting cards when the rules are constantly changing. She found that bilingual children outperformed monolingual peers in a challenging condition that required them to update the rule they followed for sorting, such as shape vs. color. A series of follow-up studies, by Bialystok and colleagues as well as other research teams, reported further evidence of bilingual children’s heightened capacity to direct attention and ignore distracters.
But scientific research tends to swing like a pendulum, and when the backlash came for the research on bilingual cognitive advantages, it was fierce and sustained. The first body blow came in 2013, when San Francisco State University researchers Kenneth Paap and Zachary Greenberg published their findings from three large-scale studies under the no-holds-barred title “There Is No Coherent Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage in Executive Processing.” Paap and Greenberg compared bilingual and monolingual young adults on 15 measures of executive processing. They determined only one statistically significant difference in performance on tasks requiring executive control—and it favored the monolingual speakers.
More tellingly, researchers eager to discover evidence of bilingual advantages have given up their efforts after many disappointments, then come clean about the number of studies they declined to publish after their initial hypotheses were not supported. A 2014 paper by Angela de Bruin and two colleagues has some elements of a lurid tell-all, despite being published in an ordinarily staid scientific journal. “We ourselves are guilty,” the authors wrote, going on to reveal that their 2009 publication reporting a bilingual advantage on a spatial attention task was the product of one of four related experiments. Three of the four showed no difference between bilingual and monolingual subjects and were left in the proverbial file drawer; only the single “successful” result was shepherded on to publication. The researchers then conducted another study that showed no effect of bilingualism and was again left unpublished.
Of course, proponents of bilingual cognitive advantage did not take such claims lying down, and the years that followed have seen a brisk back-and-forth between the two camps. “The field has now reached an impasse,” declared a 2019 review by Australian linguist Mark Antoniou, noting that “certain research groups consistently find support for a bilingual advantage, while other groups consistently find none.” But even staunch supporters of bilingual advantage generally concede that the effects are not huge—measurable in the laboratory but perhaps not important in real life—and may be inconsistently detectable across one’s life span.
When I asked fellow researchers how they felt about the overblown vision of bilingual advantage that many parents have absorbed, they warned me not to stir this particular pot. America has a strong monolingual bias, they pointed out. Pressure to conform to this norm prevents many immigrant families from embracing their mother tongue, even though bilingualism could foster richer cultural connections and also open professional doors for their children. But the families my colleagues are worried about are the very same ones getting edged out of dual-language schools by overzealous monolingual parents. At this stage, it could be a useful corrective to tap the brakes on the PR machine touting the brain benefits of bilingual education.
Can we reframe the conversation to focus on the unique opportunity bilingualism creates to forge connections among people with different worldviews? A classroom that brings together learners from different linguistic and social backgrounds can help a child understand that there is more than one lens through which to perceive the world. From this perspective, parents should insist that their child’s dual-language classroom include a healthy representation of students with cultural ties to the target language: Their contribution is indispensable.
The thing is, no one disagrees on the value of bilingual education when the goal is to actually teach the child a second language. If we support our children in acquiring and retaining the school language, it can expand career opportunities and support them in becoming more egalitarian, empathetic citizens of the world. If we listen to the science, it tells us that the goal of bilingual education is not to replace gifted and talented—it’s to raise bilingual citizens.
