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Cool Breeze Posted 15 years ago
Linguistics Studies

The Bilingual Advantage

There is an interesting article about biligualism in The New York Times. You can read it [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?_r=1&hpw]here.[/url] I wonder why nothing is said about trilingualism? It says in the article that until about the 1960s bilingualism was considered a disadvantage in the USA. Is that true? A disadvantage? I'm beginning to understand the US mentality better...[:)]

CB
  

Top answer

” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. ” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

— Mister Micawber

  • ” The monolingual children couldn’t answer.
  • They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall.
  • ” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.
  • Really?
  • It's important that it's grammatically correct and unimportant that it's silly?
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5 Answers
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Oops - just a couple of questions into her interview, and I was already brought short by this remark:

We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatica
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Mister MicawberGuess I should take up a second language.
You live in Japan, Mr M. I don't think you can help learning some Japanese, which is a natural choice for you. There is a Finnish member of parliament in Japan, Marutei Tsurunen. I should say he was Finnish. I don't know how good his Japanese is, though. He seems to have japanized
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[url=http://homepage2.nifty.com/yugatsuru/index.html] His Japanese is quite good[/url]. He pops up in the news from time to time, though I haven't really followed his political career.
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Mister MicawberReally? It's important that it's grammatically correct and unimportant that it's silly?
Well, yes, but ... context ...

I assume in the context of answering whether something is grammatically correct, the most important thing is to be able to say whether it's grammatically correct. In answering whether something is silly, the most impor
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CalifJimI assume in the context of answering whether something is grammatically correct, the most important thing is to be able to say whether it's grammatically correct. In answering whether something is silly, the most important thing is to be able to say whether it's silly.
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