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Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means

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dc.contributor.authorBullock Oliveira, Maggie
dc.contributor.authorSanches de Oliveira, Guilherme
dc.contributor.departmentFilosofía
dc.date.accessioned2026-02-23T13:14:04Z
dc.date.available2026-02-23T13:14:04Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractFor decades now a research question has firmly established itself as a staple of psychological and neuroscientific investigations on language, namely the question of whether and how bilingualism is cognitively beneficial, detrimental or neutral. As more and more studies appear every year, it seems as though the research question itself is firmly grounded and can be answered if only we use the right experimental manipulations and subject the data to the right analysis methods and interpretive lens. In this paper we propose that, rather than merely improving prior methods in the pursuit of evidence in one direction or another, we would do well to carefully consider whether the research question itself is as firmly grounded as it might appear to be. We identify two bodies of research that suggest the research question to be highly problematic. In particular, drawing from work in sociolinguistics and in embodied cognitive science, we argue that the research question of whether bilingualism is cognitively advantageous or not is based on problematic assumptions about language and cognition. Once these assumptions are addressed head on, a straightforward answer to the question arises, but the question itself comes to seem to be a poor starting point for research. After examining why this is so, we conclude by exploring some implications for future research.
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dc.format.extent23
dc.identifier.citationSanches de Oliveira, G. and Bullock Oliveira, M. (2022) Bilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means. Front. Psychol. 13:867166. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867166
dc.identifier.doi10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867166
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10201/210682
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherFrontiers
dc.relationSin financiación externa a la Universidad
dc.relation.publisherversionhttps://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867166/full
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 International*
dc.rights.accessRightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/*
dc.subjectbilingualism
dc.subjectmultilingualism
dc.subjectlanguage ideologies
dc.subjectsociolinguistics
dc.subjectcommunities of practice
dc.subjectinformation processing
dc.subjectembodied cognition
dc.subjectecological psychology
dc.subject.odsNo relacionado con ningún objetivo de desarrollo sostenible
dc.titleBilingualism is always cognitively advantageous, but this doesn’t mean what you think it means
dc.typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.type.versioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublicationes
relation.isAuthorOfPublication60f0aa5a-7048-4323-a66d-a29676e28baa
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery60f0aa5a-7048-4323-a66d-a29676e28baa
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