This study seems to focus on acquired languages and ignores mulitple languages learned in childhood. As someone who grew up speaking three languages (German, Hebrew and English) I feel as if this has expanded my ability to conceptualize and form abstractions because I know "what it is like" to think natively in languages with different vocabularies and syntactic structures. That comes naturally with no effort when you're young, but is nearly impossible to acquire later in life.
I agree with you. I once had an argument with a monolingual English-speaking person who was convinced that language is necessary for thinking, or that thinking somehow comes from language, which couldn't be further from my experience where I will have an abstract thought and then try to put it into words.
However it took years for me to be conscious of the abstract thinking. I started out by thinking in my native tongue, then thinking in my native tongue and mentally translating into English, then thinking in English, before finally not thinking in any language at all.
This. I know it has very little scientific merit, but Roger Penrose's argument that "consciousness is quantum" always rang that bell to me, the thought (or a solution to a problem) comes to me always entirely at once, not one word at a time.
The scientific method seems to me language-based. How to come up with hypotheses, however, seems to me exactly as you mention. They just pop out of nowhere, like a sudden inspiration that has been processing in the background and now just clicks.
I am not sure what you mean by the scientific method. The scientific method can be as simple as trial-and-error or observation, such as the idea that maybe you shouldn't eat a certain berry if you just watched someone eat one right before they passed out and started foaming at the mouth. Animals without highly developed language do this all the time.
There is no doubt that writing out or sounding out your reasoning can boost your ability to think and communicate. For example, it can promote a dialectic which can refine your ideas, and you can even have an inner dialogue using language. It can also help you form a representation of the thought process for communication.
But it can also muddle your thinking or leave you with blind spots if the language is not expressive enough or you rely on it too much. You do not need a linguistic representation of a concept in order to reason about it (well, I don't seem to and I doubt I'm special in that regard).
Just because an internally consistent language may be sufficient for basic reasoning doesn't mean it's necessary overall, or that it doesn't place a 'ceiling' on the types of thoughts you can think. I would argue that it cuts both ways.
It is definitely interesting that you seemingly get reasoning "for free" when you only optimize for language (e.g. large language models). But that is the way it would be if grammar was a more formal descendant of logic.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I am a bit late, but I meant coming up with a Hypothesis and validating it through empirical evidence. Connecting these two explicitly needs logic (when I do x y happens) and, IMHO, logic needs language (or at least seems to have a relationship with language).
I guess if animals can do this, we have to options: either animals have language (even if basic) or the scientific method does not require language. I see merit in both arguments.
About thinking, I always think (hah) of this quote:
"Lo que solemos elevar a la categoría de meditaciones no es más que el ruido de un motor encendido." Ray Loriga
My idiomatic translation: "What we usually elevate to thinking/thoughts is only the noise of a running engine."
I also believe language is necessary for thinking. I would define thinking as following the scientific method, though. That is, thinking is not necessary to tie my shoelaces or go shopping or dance (that I consider more autopilot, maybe like system 1 and 2?). But to make a rigorous argument, IMO one needs language. Under this definition of thinking it seems logic is pretty important, and logic seems to me language-based.
> I also believe language is necessary for thinking.
I suspect that different people think verbally to different degrees. I mean, everyone uses words in their head to manipulate ideas, to some extent; but some people use pictures more than others, and some people are very abstract, and despite being super-bright, aren't very good at translating their ideas into clear language.
Do people not able to think without language normally? Does everyone have an internal sound for everything they think all the time? I don’t, I am bilingual but I don’t think this is true. I’m surprised to hear that.
I think the commenters here are focusing on acquired languages, but does the study? I don’t think so, since the bilingual cohort was 2x as likely to be low socioeconomic status.
Good point. I guess I assumed that the second language was acquired later in life because otherwise it's not really "acquiring a second language", it's "acquiring multiple languages at the same time."
In looking back over this, I stumbled over this study which seems to directly contradict the one in the original link:
"This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young immigrant children challenged by poverty..."
which implies that there is a "cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism".
So maybe the original study is just bogus. Or maybe this one is. Who knows? Sociology doesn't have a stellar reputation for generating reproducible results.
The study was based on 'test your brain health!' type online surveys/games hosted by Cambridge Brain Sciences. The user portal is https://brainlabs.me/ . They just grabbed a sample of 40k people who played certain games and dumped it into some data processing software. It's absolutely par for the course for modern social science studies, but makes any conclusions of dubious value for countless reasons.
Put another way, I think the discussion is probably at relevant as the study.
That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me.
Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult.
(In fact, I don't even have to imagine. I know what it is like to learn a language as an adult, and how different that is from learning one as a child, because I've done both.)
Of course. That is all anyone can do with respect to any counterfactual. So what? You were making a claim about the fidelity of my imagination:
"You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like."
And that's not true. I have several pretty good clues. Not only that, but what I imagine about the counterfactual me leads me to be able to formulate a testable hypothesis with respect to non-counterfactual situations, namely, that acquiring multiple languages in one's youth does afford some measurable cognitive advantages in general.
You can get a lot of leverage out of imagining things.
