This article in the NY Times was very interesting. Research suggests that bilingual children, and even monolingual children who were exposed to another language, were better at communication than monolingual children who only were exposed to one language. The studies conducted were quite innovative. It seemed to come down to the bilingual children being more perceptive. Here is their explanation:

quote:

Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.

>sigh.< I sure would like to see the study itself but it costs $35 to read it. (First thing I want to see is sample size). I am automatically skeptical of studies theorizing anything at all about huge vague categories like "interpersonal communication."

I'm also aware there are similar baby studies trying to get at when does a baby recognize that he can see the object but the speaker cannot-- if I'm aware of them they must be pretty well known. I would like to see whether this study took those into account.

Another gripe: where but in the US & perhaps a few other English-speaking countries could you find a big enough sample of youngsters who were not exposed to other languages? Given that, & the results of this study, is one to make the ludicrous conclusion that US children are deficient in 'interpersonal communication' skills?

Wow am I curmudgeonly. I'll admit an active dislike of psychological research, which has since inception, it seems to me, attempted to make sweeping generalizations based on measuring the unmeasurable and data-crunching the results. Today as we speak, there are pilot programs in public schools for teaching/ testing/measuring/ data-collection on "grit", "empathy", "resilience", "joy"-- all in an effort to provide the [misguided, micromanaging, bought-by-ed-testing-companies] USDOEd with "at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance."

Meanwhile there are plenty of studies demonstrating the various advantages of starting for-lang-learning early, if that's what you want to know!

Well, I see your point, but if we don't study problems/issues, we'll never learn about them. There are excellent designs and statistics that can take intervening variables into account.

Having said that, I didn't see the original study, too, and I agree, that is a must when reporting results. 25 lashes with the wet noodle to me!

If we weren't to study psychological issues, we'd be stuck with bench research that often doesn't tell us much about real life. I have much respect for both kinds of research.

In qualitative research, the sample sizes are not large, but the data are rich and incorporate the context. To me the most valuable studies are those that use both quantitative and qualitative methods.