Finnish investigators have found that prior research suggesting acquisition and active use of two languages enhances executive function is overly optimistic.

In the meta-analysis, researchers discovered that bilingualism is very useful in communication between people, but it does not seem to increase the cognitive skills related to executive functions.

“The benefits of bilingualism in executive functions have been in focus of active research in recent years, and the topic has received a great deal of attention not only in the scientific community but also in international media,” said Academy Research Fellow Dr. Minna Lehtonen and her research group at Department of Psychology at Åbo Akademi University.

“Active use of two languages and switching between languages has been believed to train these functions, but our comprehensive overview of the entire existing research does not support this statement.”

Lehtonen and colleagues performed a systematic review, that is, a meta-analysis of a total of 152 studies focusing on bilingual and monolingual adults’ performance in tasks that measure different areas of executive functions. These studies had been conducted in altogether 27 countries in which bilingualism takes different forms.

In the review, no significant benefits were found for bilinguals in any sub-areas of executive functions.

The study, which appears in the journal Psychological Bulletin, also analyzed a number of background factors that allegedly affect how large the observed benefit should be. Such factors included, for example, age of acquisition of the second language, the age of the participants, and language pair.

Neither did these analyses support the view that some type of bilinguals would systematically show an advantage in executive functions.

According to Lehtonen, the results indicate that bilingualism or active use of another language does not improve executive functions in healthy adults.

“The benefits of bilingualism are in the language skills and what they offer for communication between people and cultures,” Lehtonen said.

Source: Åbo Akademi University

New Study: Cognitive Benefits of Bilingualism Overstated