The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...462114
language human sciences SocialScience psychology linguistics bilingualism reproducibility replicability experiment brain neuroscience bias confirmation bias publication bias
shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Feb 16
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It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.
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But a growing number of psychologists say that this mountain of evidence is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations.
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Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, was one of them. In two large studies, involving 360 and 504 children respectively, he found no evidence that Basque kids, raised on Basque and Spanish at home and at school, had better mental control than monolingual Spanish children.
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Similar controversies have popped up throughout psychology, fueling talk of a “reproducibility crisis” in which scientists struggle to duplicate classic textbook results. In many of these cases, classic psychological phenomena that seem to be backed by years of supportive evidence, suddenly become fleeting and phantasmal. The causes are manifold. Journals are more likely to accept positive, attention-grabbing papers than negative, contradictory ones, which pushes scientists towards running small studies or tweaking experiments on the fly—practices that lead to flashy, publishable discoveries that may not actually be true.