Perspectives

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SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Benefits of Multilingualism

Bilingual rearing of children, instead

of confusing them, may bring lifelong
advantages.

Jared Diamond

332

15 OCTOBER 2010 VOL 330 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org

CREDIT: joe sutliff/www.cdad.com/joe

ultilingualismthe abilresult, multilinguals have constant

ity to understand and
unconscious practice in using the
speak several languages
executive function system.
is exceptional in the United States
Recent studies assess this abilbut common elsewhere, especially in
ity by assigning to subjects gamesmall-scale traditional societies. For
like tasks designed to be confusing,
instance, once while I was camped
either because the task rules change
with some New Guinea Highlanders
unpredictably, or because the task
conversing simultaneously in sevpresents misleading cues that must
eral local languages, I asked each
be ignored (13, 7, 8). For instance,
man to name each language in which
children are shown cards depicthe could converse. It turned out that
ing either a rabbit or a boat, colored
everyone present spoke at least 5 laneither red or blue, with or without a
guages, and the champion was a man
star. If the card has a star, the chilwho spoke 15. What are the cognidren must sort cards by color; if a
tive effects of such multilingualstar is absent, they must instead sort
ism? Recent studies (15) show that
cards by the object depicted. It turns
children raised bilingually develop
out that monolingual and bilingual
a specific type of cognitive benefit
subjects are equally successful if
during infancy, and that bilingualthe rule remains the same from trial
ism offers some protection against
to trial (e.g., sort by color), but
symptoms of Alzheimers dementia Competing inputs. A typical moment in the life of a typical Science reader, monolinguals have more difficulty
who is simultaneously processing various sensory inputs with his eyes,
in old people.
than bilinguals at accommodating to
ears, nose (the smell of the Big Mac), skin touch receptors (the friends
Bilingual education is politi- handshake, the briefcase being held), and proprioreceptors (the cramp a switch in rules. Although success
cally controversial in the United in his leg), and having competing thoughts. Depending on the circum- at these games wont by itself make
States. Even immigrants whose stances, any one of those stimuli or thoughts may warrant full attention. one rich or happy, our lives are full
native language is not English often Recent studies suggest that multilingual people may have an advantage of other misleading information and
believe that their children should over monolinguals in sifting and managing these distracting stimuli.
rule changes. If bilinguals advanlearn only English and will be contage over monolinguals in these
fused by learning two languages simultane- the figure). To succeed in doing anything at games also applies to real-life situations, that
ously. Until the 1960s, research appeared to all, we must temporarily inhibit 99% of those could be useful for bilinguals.
show that bilingual children acquired lan- inputs and attend to just 1% of them, and the
While this superior executive function
guage more slowly than monolingual chil- appropriate choice varies with the circum- has been reported for bilinguals of all ages,
dren and achieved smaller vocabularies. But stances. That selective attention involves a set results for the youngest and the oldest subother variables correlated with bilingualism of processes, termed executive function, that jects are of particular interest. Kovcs and
in those early studies, such as schooling and reside in the prefrontal cortex and develop Mehler (4, 5) tested confusing game tasks on
parental socioeconomic status, confounded especially over the first 5 years of life (9).
monolingual infants and crib bilingual
their interpretation. More recent studies,
Multilingual people have a special chal- infantsi.e., infants reared from birth to
comparing subjects matched for those other lenge involving executive function. Mono- hear and eventually to speak two languages,
variables, have found bilinguals and mono- linguals hearing a word need only compare it because mother and father speak to the infant
linguals to be largely similar in cognition and with their single stock of arbitrary phoneme in different languages. It might seem meanlanguage processing (68).
(sound) and meaning rules, and when utter- ingless to describe infants who cannot speak
The clearest difference identified by these ing a word they draw it from that single stock. as monolingual or bilingual. Actually, infants
studies involves an advantage that bilinguals But multilinguals must keep several stocks learn to discriminate the sounds of the lanhave over monolinguals, rather than a disad- separate. For instance, on hearing the pho- guage or languages heard around them, and
vantage. Our minds are assaulted by varied nemes b-u-rr-o, a Spanish/Italian bilingual to ignore sound distinctions not heard around
sights, sounds, and other external sensory instantly interprets them to mean either don- them. For instance, Japanese infants lose, and
inputs, plus thoughts and proprioreceptive key, if the context is Spanish, or butter, if English infants retain, the ability to discrimisensations (which make us aware of the rel- the context is Italian. Multilinguals partici- nate the liquid consonants l and r, which the
ative positions of our own body parts) (see pating in a multilingual conversation, like Japanese language does not distinguish.
my New Guinea Highland friends or shop
How can one test responses to speech by
assistants
in
Scandinavian
department
stores,
those
preverbal infants? Kovcs and Mehler
Geography Department, University of California Los Angeswitch frequently and unpredictably between (4, 5) devised a clever protocol in which infants
les, Los Angeles, CA 900951524, USA. E-mail: jdiamond@
geog.ucla.edu
their stocks of phoneme/meaning rules. As a looked for pictures of a puppet appearing on

Perspectives
EMBARGOED UNTIL 2:00 PM US EASTERN TIME THURSDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2010
the left side of a computer screen. The infants
were conditioned to anticipate the puppet
by first hearing a nonsense trisyllable (e.g.,
lo-lo-vu). Within nine trials, both monolingual and bilingual infants learned to look
toward the screens left side when they heard
that trisyllable. But when Kovcs and Mehler
changed the rules and made the puppet appear
on the screens right side after broadcasting a
different trisyllable, the bilingual infants
unlearned their previous lesson and learned
the new response within six more trials. In
contrast, the monolingual infants couldnt
learn the new response even after nine trials.
Evidently, shifting frequently and unpredictably between hearing two parental languages
made bilingual infants better able to cope
with other unpredictable rule changes.
Do these findings suggest that bilinguals
have an advantage over monolinguals in
negotiating our confusing world of changing
rules, and not merely in the task of discriminating lo-lo-vu from lo-vu-lo? You readers
may demand evidence of more tangible benefits before you commit yourselves to babbling
in two different languages to your infant children. Hence, you may be more impressed by
recent results suggesting a protective effect
of lifelong bilingualism against symptoms of
Alzheimers disease (10). Among hundreds
of elderly Canadian patients with a probable Alzheimers diagnosis, bilingual patients

showed their first symptoms at an age 5 years

older than did monolingual patients matched
in other respects. Canadian life expectancy is
79, hence a 5-year delay for people in their
70s translates into a 47% decreased probability that they will develop Alzheimers symptoms at all before they die.
How might this be? A short answer is the
aphorism, Use it or lose it. Exercising body
systems improves their function; not exercising them lets their function deteriorate. Thats
why athletes and musicians practice. Its also
why Alzheimers patients are encouraged to
play brain-challenging games like bridge or
to solve Sudoku puzzles. But bilingualism
is arguably the most constant practice possible for the brain. Whereas even a Sudoku
fanatic can spend only a fraction of a day
on Sudoku puzzles, bilinguals impose extra
exercise on their brain every minute of their
waking hours. Consciously or unconsciously,
the bilingual brain constantly has to decide:
Shall I think, speak, or interpret sounds spoken to me according to the arbitrary rules of
language A, or language B?
There are other unanswered questions. If
one extra language offers some protection, do
two extra languages offer more protection?
If so, is the relationship between protection
and number of extra languages linear, sublinear, or supralinear? For example, if bilinguals get 5 years of protection from their one

extra language, do Scandinavian shop assistants speaking five languages also get just
5 years of protection, or do they get 5 4 =
20 years of protection? If you, alas, were not
raised as a crib bilingual, will learning a second language in school let you catch up? Do
bilinguals advantages in coping with rule
changes and confusing cues extend beyond
trivial game tasks to real-life situations, such
as school success and understanding other
peoples mental states? What neural mechanisms underlie bilingualisms reported protection against Alzheimers symptoms? These
questions will be of theoretical interest to
linguists, and of practical interest to parents
wondering how best to raise their children.
References
1. E. Bialystok, Dev. Psychol. 46, 93 (2010).
2. E. Bialystok, X. Feng, Brain Lang. 109, 93 (2009).
3. E. Bialystok, M. Viswanathan, Cognition 112, 494
(2009).
4. A. M. Kovcs, J. Mehler, Science 325, 611 (2009).
5. A. M. Kovcs, J. Mehler, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106,
6556 (2009).
6. E. Bialystok, Bilingualism and Development (Cambridge
Univ. Press, New York, 2001).
7. S. M. Carlson, A. N. Meltzoff, Dev. Sci. 11, 282 (2008).
8. A. Costa, M. Hernndez, N. Sebastin-Galls, Cognition
106, 59 (2008).
9. T. Shallice, From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure
(Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1988)
10. E. Bialystok, F. I. Craik, M. Freedman, Neuropsychologia
45, 459 (2007).
10.1126/science.1195067

materials science

Recasting Metal Alloy Phases

with Block Copolymers

Highly complex metal alloy phases have been

replicated at a larger scale with spherical
aggregates formed from polymers.

Mihai Peterca and Virgil Percec*

rystalline order develops through a

balance between short-range attractive and repulsive interactions (1)
that not only operate on atoms but work at
the nanoscale on supramolecular structures
(2). Spherical particles often pack together
into simple, high-symmetry arrangements,
but more complex topologically closepacked structures, such as the Frank-Kasper
phase (3, 4) first seen in metal alloys, have
also been observed (see the figure, panel A).
Spherical supramolecular aggregates formed
Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104
6323, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed.
E-mail: percec@sas.upenn.edu

from polymers and monodisperse branched

macromolecules (57) can be used to mimic
atoms and explore how these phases arise.
On page 349 of this issue, Lee et al. (8)
show that linear block copolymers that form
spherical aggregates through microphase
separation can crystallize into a FrankKasper phase. Relative to metal alloys, the
volume of its crystalline repeating unit, the
unit cell, is six orders of magnitude greater
(see the figure, panel C). The scaling up of
atomic lattices by using spherical supramolecular aggregates is also of practical interest because such structures could be used as
photonic materials (9), nanoreactors (5), or
drug delivery vehicles (10).
Understanding how spherical supramo-

lecular aggregates organize into crystals

remains a challenging task. In the ideal case
of incompressible hard sphereswhich
are a good model for metal atomsthe most
stable structures correspond to the hexagonal
close-packed (hcp) and face-centered cubic
(fcc) periodic close-packing configurations
shown in panel A of the figure. These structures maximize the packing of atoms and fill
74% of their unit cell volume (versus 68% for
the body-centered cubic, or bcc, packing).
The stability of the packing derives from
large numbers of nearest neighbors interactions that decrease free energy.
Spherical aggregates formed by soft macromolecules, including block copolymers,
should follow the same principle and pre-

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