The Babylonian benefit

E nter any research laboratory and you will most likely find an almost Babylonian confusion: French researchers discussing their experiments in French, but quickly switching to English when joined by their Chinese colleague. A German researcher may answer the phone in German while talking to a Spanish colleague in English. English is the de facto lingua franca of science: of research papers, grant proposals, and at conferences. In many laboratories, even outside Anglo-Saxon countries, English is the working language. In addition, for many scientists who move abroad, English will not be their only language problem. They and their family may be confronted with yet another foreign language in their daily life. Researchers whose first language is not English may envy native speakers for their linguistic advantage: responding spontaneously to a question, expressing complex ideas or communicating subtle nuances is so much easier in one’s mother tongue, even if one has reached high proficiency in a foreign language. However, there is some solace for those who are confronted with the challenge of having to master two languages. There is now growing evidence that learning more than one language enhances mental performance beyond the language domain. Bilingualism, in fact, has an impact on general cognitive functioning at all ages, and recent research shows that it could even delay the onset of symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease. “The overwhelming belief for a long time was that bilingualism was a source of confusion and difficulty”, said neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Exposing children to more than one language was originally regarded as a mental burden, which would handicap children in their language development and hamper their general performance. First serious evidence against this view came from a bilingual country: A study in the early 1960s by Elizabeth Peal and Wallace E. Lambert from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, showed that bilingualism was not a problem, but perhaps a boon.