Does speaking more than one language impact your test scores?
Growing up in an Indian city and then coming to Montreal to study, I can fluently speak three languages and conduct a basic conversation in another.
As an increasing number of people in the world today are speaking more than one language. It is important to understand the consequences of this trend on current forms of testing (neuropsychological, Stroop task etc.)
This is because the samples used in many psychology studies are limited in more ways than one. Samples usually consist of psychology students who learn about methods and interventions in their classes and can sometimes tell when they are being deceived in the experiment. Furthermore, studies don’t differentiate between monolinguals and bilinguals or multilinguals. This may question the validity of the results as there is increasing evidence from recent research that monolinguals significantly differ from bilinguals or multilinguals in certain aspects.
A study concluded that bilingual individuals spend less time looking at cognates — words that look similar and have a similar meaning in both the languages they speak. Such as “milk” in English and “melk” in Dutch. It is also believed that bilinguals may have a smaller vocabulary in the languages they speak and this may impact the neuropsychological tests that they participate in. Researchers may incorrectly assess a bilingual patient’s language ability while assessing the effect of brain damage as most tests are normed on samples of monolinguals (who know more words). This finding could also impact scores from standardized tests like the SAT, LSAT, GRE etc. as bilinguals or multilinguals might do worse simply because of their limited vocabulary.
Research also shows that adults who have been bilingual for a majority of their life, may be using their brains more efficiently than their monolingual counterparts. Bilinguals or multilinguals may find it easier to switch between tasks as they regularly switch between languages. This could impact some aspects like their reaction time on psychological tests.
But, being a multilingual myself I believe this could depend on the immediate context. While I am in Montreal I don’t switch between languages as often as I do when I am in India. So, I am uncertain if the benefits of switching would apply if I was staying in Montreal for a prolonged period of time and was conversing in English only.
Whether bilinguals or multilinguals have a definite advantage compared to monolinguals and whether the advantage is significant in all the languages they are fluent in, is something only time will tell. But it would be interesting to know how that changes current methods or definitions in psychological testing. If there is more support for the differences between monolinguals, bilinguals and multilinguals in the future, it would probably force researchers to differentiate between monolinguals and bilinguals the way they currently differentiate using age, race or gender.
References:
