Episode 011: Ellen Bialystok

Prof. Ellen Bialystok is a psychologist who studies the bilingual brain. Her work traces the development of the brain from infancy to old age, looking at the effect of bilingualism on our ability to pay attention to things. Her work has tremendous implications for public policy in an age of increasing immigration and increasing xenophobia.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Professor Ellen Bialystok of York University. Professor Bialystok is a psychologist who studies how bilingualism, the simple fact of learning and using a second language affects how your brain works. As you can imagine, her work has direct importance for public policy in countries like Canada, New Zealand and Belgium where bilingualism and multilingualism are woven into the laws of the land. It also has immense social significance at a time when immigrants and refugees are under attack in so many countries. Her scholarly publications number in the hundreds and have been cited almost 50,000 times. She's an officer of the Order of Canada, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the winner of the prestigious Killam Prize for the social sciences. Professor Bialystok spoke to me at York University in June and I hope you enjoy our conversation. … Ellen, I am so happy that you made time to join us on the podcast.

Ellen Bialystok: Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Cameron: Your research is on bilingualism, but I'm interested in why it is you focus on bilingualism. What is the kind of broader context in which you're working?

Ellen: I began as a developmental psychologist who was interested in the interface of language and cognition in children's development. And I noticed that there was a divergence of development in children who for whatever reason also spoken another language. I became interested in that and dug around on that question for about 10 years before realizing that speaking two languages was changing something about their cognitive ability. Not only their language ability, their cognitive ability. This was important at the time because for most of the last century there was a prevailing belief that bilingualism was very bad for children. It made them “confused” and “retarded” and “delayed” and it was really a terrible thing to do to a child, but my observations were showing me something different. So that was the beginning of my detailed study of how then one experience bilingualism could affect cognition and cognitive development. As I came to understand later, it's one of many and it turns out that all intense experiences that we have also affect development in various ways. Although I would argue none as profoundly as bilingualism.

Cameron: Before we get too far into our conversation, maybe we should define what bilingualism is. When I read your work, there's four words that keep coming up:  lexicon, syntax, phonology, and pragmatics. What are these about? Are these about bilingualism specifically?

Ellen: Right? Well, there's two parts to your question, so let me start with that one. These four words are levels or aspects of language that we can describe. We can talk about the vocabulary, the grammar, the sound system, and the rules of use. Those are indeed the lexicon, syntax, phonology and pragmatics. And if you're going to master a language, you have to master all of them. As native speakers, we don't even think about it. That's the linguistic analysis. What have you learned when you learn another language? But your question carries something much more profound. And that is at what point in encountering and learning and even mastering a second language or a third language are we prepared to say this person is bilingual? And this is a very, very central issue because it turns out that how we answer that question, what criteria, what standards we place on the description of bilingualism is highly influential in what we ended up finding. So my view now is that bilingualism is a continuum. Everyone knows smatterings in bits of other languages. All educated people have studied to some imperfect degree another language or traveled and stumbled through another language. So nobody is a linguistic purist, monolingual or bilingual. And what we need to understand is the features of that continuum of bilingual experience that are consequential in the kinds of effects that I describe in my research. How much bilingual experience is necessary, what kind of bilingual experience is necessary, and so on. So the first definition has to be to kind of shake loose of this categorical approach in which people are monolingual or bilingual, and accept the messiness of the continuous approach and talk about how bilingual.

Cameron: My experience in places like Montreal is that if you're sitting at a table or beside people at a restaurant who are fully bilingual, fully fluent, they seamlessly switch back and forth sometimes in the same sentence between English and French. It's extremely messy to me as a person who is taught in school how to be bilingual …

Ellen: Exactly right.

Cameron: ... in very isolated subjects. You've got your regular schooling in English for me, and then you've got this one class that you go to and everything has to be in French and there's really no crossover.

Ellen: Exactly. And that's actually not how life works. And then there's the great Air Canada greeting: “Allo bonjour!”

Cameron: [laughs] These things are very messy as you say and they're observable at a really early age in kind of fledgling state. One of the comments that I noticed in one of your papers you were talking about this aspect of phonology, which is hearing and using the sounds. Is that you can actually see an aspect of phonology in infants who are deaf because they're trying to use their hands to express themselves in some ways. Is that somehow related to phonology as well?

Ellen: Well, that's exactly phonology and there's a rich body of research on language acquisition in deaf infants and children. The language in this case being manual instead of vocal, but it's equivalent to any other spoken language on all those four dimensions you started the question with. It has all four aspects and they're all fully elaborated and deaf babies learn all of them. And so the counterpart for phonology is hand movements that are babbles in that they're little fragments of the hand configurations that are part of the fully formed sign language.

Cameron: Okay. So is your research on bilingualism... Does it have an implication for understanding what's going on in the deaf community? What's the equivalent of bilingualism in terms of a spoken language within the deaf community? Is it just knowing multiple sign languages or what?

Ellen: Right. The exact equivalent would be a deaf speaker of two sign languages. And while I know for sure such people exist and I have met some, it's not a large community and I'm not aware of a lot of research that has studied the consequences for those folks of knowing two sign languages. There's more research on a related group who are called CODA, C-O-D-A, children of deaf adults. These are children born into families where both parents are deaf and you sign as the language of the home, but the children are hearing. And yet the first language they encounter is sign language and they learn it just as any child learns the language of the home, but because they are hearing they also learn a spoken language. So it's not exactly the situation you describe. Instead it's a person who knows two languages, one of which is signed and one of which is spoken. And for that group there is a smallish but interesting body of research. Essentially knowing two languages in different modalities is pretty much the same as knowing two spoken languages in terms of the consequences.

Cameron: In terms of the consequences for cognition, which is what you're studying. When you're doing your work on cognition, when I read your work on cognition the phrase that keeps coming up is executive function. That's the aspect of cognition that you repeatedly go back to, to say how it's changing. Can you just help me understand what executive function means?

Ellen: Right. If I could actually answer the question, my research would jump ahead about 10 years because right now this is for me the main theoretical point to be solved. So let me just give you a little bit of background as to how I got to this point and what is necessary to go further. What we noticed in our early studies was that the kinds of cognitive processes that children and then later adults were performing better if they were bilingual and monolingual were processes that involved controlled attention, shifting, holding things in memory and moving them around, avoiding conflict. Now all of those processes, we know a few things about them. They hang together in two ways. First, they all reside in the very front part of the brain because they're all effortful. The front part of the brain is the last to mature. It's a very important part of the brain and it's expensive in that it takes energy to recruit this front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex in processing information. And so you only use it when it's necessary. So all of the things that bilinguals were doing better where the kinds of things we associate with the front part of the brain. The second thing was that the umbrella term that continues to be used for all of those things is executive functioning or executive processing. So in the early stages of this research, it seemed that whatever it was we were finding fits that broad conceptualization, executive processes in the front of the brain. But then you have to be able to explain exactly what those processes are and why bilinguals are doing them better. And that's where things became messier. There are in the literature several theoretical conceptions of executive function, what they consist of, how they work and so on. And so I started by using those conceptualizations in the literature as a way of framing my research until it just no longer fit. The crossroads I'm at right now is two-fold. One, the predominant models for what executive functions are and how they are structured do not fit evidence we have from bilinguals. So this is a group whose particular configuration of these cognitive abilities cannot be explained by the existing models of executive function. So therefore two, what's the alternative? And that's where I am now. My view right now is that all of these whole massive things that seem to be part of the executive function, there is only one of them that is crucial to the bilingual mind. And that is, I'll call it selective attention, but I've also called it executive attention. It's the ability to laser zoom in on relevant information when it's embedded in irrelevant information. This is what bilinguals do all the time. So bilinguals have the capacity to, as you said earlier, switch between languages, understand material in both of their languages, but if you're going to actually use language efficiently, you've got to be picking from the right pool. Remarkably, we know that in the bilingual mind, both pools are active. There's no language switch. When you're speaking English, there isn't a switch that turns off French. They're both active and yet bilinguals don't make mistakes. They don't make unintentional intrusion errors. So those conversations at the Montreal dinner table, they're intentional, they know exactly what they're doing and it is remarkable how few unintentional intrusion errors there are. This means that bilinguals are always selecting the language they want even though the other language is active. That's what I think is key here. It's this attention selection control, when there are distracting alternatives, that's shaping the bilingual mind. And it shapes the mind to be better at attention, selection and control even when it's not about language.

Cameron: Right. I don't want to get too far out of your field of expertise and maybe I'm not, but the questions that pop up when you're talking about these things are about things like attention deficit disorder and autism. Is there a connection in at least the way that you model those kinds of things?

Ellen: Well, they're really the important questions and there's a tiny bit of research on both. I hope more research will follow. But let me say a little bit about attention deficit disorder because this one is clearer to me. It is a clinical condition in which those prefrontal processes of attention and selection are impaired. Kids – and this disability continues into adulthood -- have difficulty in focusing and bringing those zoomy lenses into the information they need. And this creates all sorts of problems. What I've just said is that bilingualism seems to improve those processes so you could reasonably ask, does it also improve them for people who have this particular condition in which those processes are impaired? You can predict either way. Now there's only two studies that I know of, one of which we did and one that was done by a group in Haifa. Both of these studies were with adults, not children, but we got exactly the same result. The result was this. If you add bilingualism onto an impairment in the prefrontal cortex that's expressed as an attentional deficit disorder, that seems to exacerbate the attentional disorder. So in both our study and in the Haifa study, the adults who were bilingual and also clinically diagnosed with an attentional disorder perform more poorly than monolingual adults with an attentional disorder on the set of tasks. They used different tasks than we did, but they got the same result. My interpretation is that both of these things are challenging the prefrontal cortex and at some point the challenge is just too great. So bilingualism endogenously requires that you have this system to respond to it and the interesting finding is that that experience actually benefits the system. But if the system has some kind of other way of functioning, some deviation from the more typical way of functioning, adding on bilingualism, may then add too much stress to the system. And that's only two studies. So really a lot more research is needed, but I think we have to be open to that possibility.

Cameron: I'm interested in what this research actually looks like when you're doing this research on how people attend to tasks. Maybe we can start with the work that you did with children, where you're getting them to execute tasks and you're giving them different visual and auditory cues and requiring different uses of their eyes and their mouths and ears. Can you describe, like, what does the experiment actually look like? What do you do?

Ellen: When we started doing this research and I thought what we were investigating was really just executive functioning, we used a pretty wide variety of the tasks that exist in that kind of research. So this is the thing. The studies of executive functioning are a kind of a big business and they have tasks. So the tasks typically present cues that have two pieces of information and only one of them is relevant for the answer. The most famous of these is the Stroop task. You see words printed on a page and the words will be, for example, the names of colors printed in black ink, blue, green, red, yellow. And all you have to do is read the words. And then in the critical condition, you see these same words, but they're printed in colored ink. Now sometimes the color of the ink is the same. So blue is printed in blue, green is printed in green. And what you're told now is, "Don't read the word. Just don't even read the word. Name the color of the ink. Don't read the word." So people say, "Okay, blue, green, yellow. It's all right." They say, "Okay." But here's the tricky condition. Now you're seeing these stimuli again, but the words are printed in the wrong color. So blue is printed in green, red is printed in yellow, and you're told, "Don't read the word. Just name the color." Well, you can't not read the word. It's impossible. So what you have conflict and what you have is information about two kinds of dimensions, the color of the ink and the meaning of the word, bashing against your brain at the same moment. And you have to pay attention to one and ignore the other. This is the standard executive function dilemma and it exists in many different kinds of tasks. You can use space and responses, it doesn't matter. You're always pitting two things against each other where you have a strong drive to respond to one even though you know you're not supposed to. That's the kind of conflict task that we use, that bilinguals typically find easier to resolve.

Cameron: There might be different factors that are affecting a person's ability to handle that kind of conflicting task. This is just a general social science question, how do you go about controlling for all those other possible explanations so that you can zero in on whether it's the bilingualism causing the difference?

Ellen: Exactly. And this is the dilemma of human research because every individual is different from every other individual in untold ways. So we have various procedures and we design our studies to be as for the samples to be as coherent, consistent, controlled as possible and then we look at the results. But then in parallel we introduce other factors that may be involved. For example, in this research, it was suggested early on that it isn't bilingualism, it's socioeconomic status that's driving the results. Now, socioeconomic status is an enormous factor in child development. It's massively important. It's been demonstrated in, in essentially every aspect of developments. We say, all right, we think we've controlled our groups, no problem. And then we can do an experiment in which we deliberately use socioeconomic status as a variable and bilingualism. So we have four groups instead of two groups so we can statistically evaluate this. And we do this, other people did the same thing, and on the basis of those results we can rule it out. Other people would suggest, well it isn't bilingualism, it's culture or language or immigration or any one of a number of other things, which in truth are different in bilingual groups. So what we do for each of them is pull out selected groups that vary deliberately on those factors and compare those factors statistically with bilingualism one at a time. And in each case we can say, "Nope, it wasn't that. The bilingual effect remains, the effects of immigration or culture or language do not."

Cameron: You've published so many articles that I didn't read them all in preparing for this. But neither did you. [laughs] The phrase executive function kept coming out to me as a key to your research. Are there other aspects of cognition that you are interested in around bilingualism?

Ellen: Well again, we've looked at some that haven't... Actually, I think it's important to show where bilingualism affects cognition and where it does not. There was some research looking at various aspects of memory and the results are not really very clear, but I don't think bilingualism affects memory ability or recall ability. Other aspects of cognition that are really important are reasoning, problem solving and reasoning. And we look at studies that manipulate reasoning and problem solving and there doesn't seem to be an effective bilingualism there either. So it's very important to figure out all the things that bilingualism does not affect. And I would say memory, problem solving, and reasoning are three such aspects.

Cameron: So this whole idea of executive function, the ability to juggle multiple tasks or navigate through a set of competing tasks to remain focused on something is becoming more and more important in our society, particularly the group of people that are coming through our schools in universities now. Every one of my students, every one of my students claims to be a great multi-tasker. They've got their computers open with multiple windows during class. They've got their phone underneath the desk and they're texting people and they claim to be able to focus on the lecture and do all this other stuff. And I always call bullshit on that. Am I being too harsh or there actually some students who are maybe good at that and I'm not giving them enough credit?

Ellen: Well, it's an ability on which everybody varies. So some will be better than others, but take a look for a minute at what you've just described in terms of what I said earlier about executive functioning. So this is one of the things in that umbrella. Multitasking, shifting, this always gets named. But if you go back to what I said I think need to do in moving forward is to abandon that kind of language and talk about only one thing, selective attention. What that means is that the way the mind works, the way that prefrontal cortex works in fact, is that you can only look at one thing at a time. And so if you're looking at one thing logically, you're not getting information from another thing. So what we call multitasking really isn't multi at all. It's sequential tasking where we're able to take that spotlight and rapidly move it around an array of tasks. So we're looking at one thing at a time with greater or lesser dexterity. Two things about this. One is... No, three things. I'm going to start with your conclusion and that is nobody multitasks. It doesn't happen. But what determines the dexterity with which you can move that spotlight around and appear to be doing two things at the same time? One, huge factor of aging. So this kind of control of those prefrontal processes improves rapidly through childhood, peaking at around 20, which is going to be the age of a lot of your students, and then starts declining at around the age 30, which may also grab some of your students. So we get this-

Cameron: Interesting.

Ellen: Yeah. So we get this sort of peak area of ability on these prefrontal processes, that's kind of in your 20s. And the second factor on this ability... Well, let me just add to that. When it starts falling off, it really falls off. So the loss of that flexibility in older age is profound. And when students come to my office, if I'm in the middle of a sentence on my computer and they start talking to me, I say, "Stop talking. I can't type and listen. One thing at a time." You have to recognize you cannot do two things. The second thing is I say this ability is different among people. And one of the things that's different is that it's also different in response to experiences. The claims from my research is that bilingualism is one of those experiences. Because bilingualism is sharpening that attentional control, it also gives you a bit of an edge when you do things that we colloquially describe as multitasking.

Cameron: Let's shift to the other end of the lifespan. You've done a lot of work around childhood and development, but your research also deals with bilingualism and aging. This is becoming really salient in Canadian society at least because of demographic shifts and people of my age and often women of my age are very profoundly involved in caregiving for their elderly parents. What do we know about bilingualism and the effects of aging?

Ellen: One kind of outcome that has been shown in some studies, not all studies, is that this bilingual benefit to these attention processes that we've seen in children and young adults continues into older age so that we continue to see these benefits in the context of healthy cognitive aging. Unfortunately, aging includes cognitive decline. You're not going to remember that person's name when you run into them on the subway, you're just not. And you're not going to be able to effectively do two things at the same time. This is healthy cognitive aging. And we've shown that it's a little bit buffeted, that is a little bit protected by bilingualism on some of these behavioral tasks in older age. But the far more important thing that we've found is that, I think not surprisingly when you think about it, is that this lifelong experience of always having two languages activated in your mind and requiring this selection all the time, rewires your brain, reconfigures brain networks, changes the network activations that are involved in doing all kinds of ordinary tasks, but especially tasks that require selection. So what we have over time is a bilingual brain that has a different configuration. Which bits do you use to solve this problem? When we look in older age, these differences seem to be supporting a protected performance in older bilingual adults. So I want to say that it's not so much that they perform better on a Stroop test, although they often do, it's that their brains are wired a little bit differently and that has profound implications for when things really start to go wrong. Because you reach a point where atrophy and brain structure and deterioration of brain networks lead to a situation where cognitive decline is not typical or not what we would consider to be part of healthy aging, and we begin to see signs of cognitive impairment, early signs of dementia and so on. And yet what we've shown and what many other people have shown around the world is that, all else being equal, bilinguals express that cognitive decline at a much later stage of brain atrophy. So the main outcome is that whatever this reconfiguration is for bilinguals, it takes them further.

Cameron: I'm interested in how you draw implications from your work then. So you are able to measure and describe differences between bilingual elders and monolingual elders and see what the differences are in the aging of their cognition. What can we do with that information? Is there something we could do differently with monolingual parents by encouraging them to learn a second language?

Ellen: All right. Well, these are big questions now. What are the implications of what I do? We can talk about this at several levels. The first thing I would say is language is good, more language is better, bring it on. So I think that society should be far more open to language at all stages. That's not what's happening. And throughout the Western world, governments and education systems are slashing foreign languages from curricula at all levels. This has been very dramatic-

Cameron: They are a “frill.”

Ellen: They are a frill. This has been very dramatic in Britain. Language courses are slashed. You see it in the US. I'm not aware of that happening yet in Canada, but we're always a little later to the party, but I don't see any fortification against it. So one thing is language has to be embraced as something that is a good thing. It's a good value. Even if it didn't have these cognitive and brain benefits, language would be a good thing, but if that's what we need to sell it, so be it. So language is good. But the other thing I want to say about it is this. The overriding fear of all older adults, I think globally now is dementia. As we live longer, we get vastly more cases of dementia. And of all of the varieties of dementia, I think the most frightening one is Alzheimer's disease. I don't think there's a person who doesn't personally know someone who has suffered from Alzheimer's disease. It's a horrific disease. Fine, so where is medical research in finding an intervention for Alzheimer's disease? I can tell you precisely, it is nowhere. And if you look at all drug trials at present, at various stages of development, there is no imminent promise of a pharmacological intervention. They've got nothing. So this shifts attention to the category of interventions called lifestyle. These are the things you hear about all the time. Aerobic exercise, it's fantastically important for brain health. Do crossword puzzles, join a club. All of that stuff is important and in that list is bilingualism. Just as aerobic exercise and learning a new musical instrument have been proven to be effective in maintaining brain health, so is bilingualism. In that sense, if it's you've got to fight this terrifying disease, then I think more positive attitudes towards language really need to be cultivated from the beginning, from when children are in school. I feel that in deeply monolingual countries like the United States, what I often feel is a fear of language. They're afraid of language. It seems too hard, too foreign, too unnecessary, and I think that fear has kept language off the cultural agenda in a way that is not a good thing.

Cameron: Well, they're huge political implications then for your work.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Cameron: I want to go back to the question of your research methods just because there has been a big shift since you began your research in terms of the technology that's available. I know that you have done research in the latter part of your career that uses a lot of things like MRI. What does that kind of thing allow you to do differently than the kind of experiments we talked about with the kids identifying colors and words?

Ellen: Right, well, it's been a game changer and in the best possible way. Because to really understand the mind, you need information about the mind, which you can observe through performance on behavioral tasks, but you also need to combine it with information about the brain and the combination has been very powerful. I can give you an example of a study we recently completed and have not yet published or not yet published all of it. This is a very big study. It'll be published in pieces. But here's the sort of kernel of the idea. We were interested in trying to understand precisely what it is about older bilingual minds that's protecting them in the ways that I've been describing. So we recruited large samples of older adults who were monolingual or bilingual. We tried to make the dichotomy as clear as possible. They were all healthy, they were all the same age, they were all between 70 and 80 years old. They were all experiencing what they described as normal, healthy cognitive aging. None of them had ever complained about cognitive failure or memory complaints. None of them had ever seen a neurologist. They just were all healthy, older adults just hobbling along that path of cognitive aging. We gave them a large battery of cognitive tasks and basically they performed equivalently. The bilinguals were a little better on a couple of them, especially on the more challenging ones, where you have to keep more things in mind and not get distracted. Bilinguals were a bit better, that was good, but mostly they were the same. Based on the behavior, you'd say, "Well, the bilinguals were a titch better," but you're not going to make much fuss about that. But then we looked at their brains and we did very detailed structural and functional analysis of their brains.

Cameron: Using MRI.

Ellen: Using MRI. And two main outcomes. First, when we look at brain structure, that is how much brain atrophy is there. And again, atrophy is normal, but a lot of atrophy is a problem. When we looked at brain atrophy in both gray matter which is the neurons, and white matter which is the fatty cells that cover of the neurons and allow the brain areas to speak to each other, the monolinguals had way better brains. The bilinguals had huge amounts of atrophy. And when you compare the brains of the monolinguals and bilinguals, you almost wonder how the bilinguals are functioning in a normal, healthy cognitive way. Their brains were significantly deteriorating. So with those impaired brains, the bilinguals were still performing at the same and sometimes better level as monolinguals. Well, how are they doing this? Something has to be enabling it. The other thing about brains is that they have what you call a resting state preparedness. When you're not doing anything – you just close your eyes but you're awake, or you stare at a blank wall and you're awake – your brain has its own level of buzz in which bits connect to each other in some preparation for what might happen next. And the most important of these resting state networks is called the default mode network. It's what allows you to actually perform tasks. Then we looked at the default mode network in the monolingual and bilingual brains. And remember the bilingual brains are really deficient in structure, but you don't need much structure to do these networks. And here the bilinguals were better. So their brains, in spite of losing volume, have better connectivity, have better preparedness for a task that's about to come. These are profound changes and if you only had behavior, you'd say, "Yeah, the bilinguals are a titch better, but they're doing fine," but you can't begin to understand what's really going on in these minds unless you also know what structure these behaviors are embedded in. For the bilinguals, because their functionality was better, they could persist longer, even though their brains were atrophying. I have to say one more thing, because you might say, "I guess bilingualism leads to brain atrophy."

Cameron: I was going there.

Ellen: Exactly.

Cameron: I'm a little worried.

Ellen: Right. That's not at all the case. What it means is... so we put out this call to the community saying, "If you're healthy, if you've never had a problem, we're interested." The assumption here, and we're investigating this now, is this: if that level of atrophy existed in a monolingual brain, they would be disqualified for our study because they would have experienced cognitive impairments. So it's a way of pushing more use, even if the system declines. So a monolingual 75-year-old with that level of atrophy would likely have been experiencing what we call mild cognitive impairment and not been eligible for our study. The bilinguals experienced no impairment, so whatever brains they have they come in, and on average – because these are large groups, we had 50 in each group, which is large for a study of this type – on average, the bilingual group included some fairly deteriorated brains, but no deterioration in cognitive function.

Cameron: I've always had this ambition to be more fluent in French. I've struggled since... Grade 6 is when I started studying French, and I'm now at the point where I can get by fairly well with written French. I read it quite well and I can write it with a little help from some grammar tools and so forth. In terms of conversational French, it's just disastrous for me. So all of this effort has gone into producing a kind of a... I really like what you said about bilingualism being like a spectrum. It makes me feel like, okay, maybe I'm somewhere along that spectrum instead of-

Ellen: Absolutely, you are.

Cameron:... simply falling short of my own ideals. But Canada has tried many different ways of increasing bilingualism in the country. I'm a bit worried some of our policies might be so successful that we're going to end up with all these people with atrophied brains, in light of what you were just saying!

Ellen: [laughs]

Cameron: But one of the most influential methods in our school system has been this notion of French immersion. Can you tell us what you know about that as a way of promoting bilingualism? Does it work?

Ellen: I think it's been very effective. French immersion has been around for about 40 or 50 years. Depends on which precise French program you take as the starting one. There's some debate about which one gets the credit, but it's at least 40 years. And here's one statistic that's changed over those 40 years. Forty years ago, the per cent of Canadians who could carry on a conversation in both English and French was at about 12%. Now that doesn't mean perfectly fluent, but to have a conversation in both English and French, it was about 12%. That number didn't budge for a long time, but now it's at 17%. And a lot of people would give credit to French immersion for bumping that number up because it's made a generation of Canadians more fluent in French. That's a good thing.

Cameron: Sorry, just to clarify, is that increased from 12% to 17%, is that in English speaking Canada as well as-

Ellen: It's in Canada as a whole.

Cameron: Oh, across the board. Wo we don't know whether it's more bilingualism than French.

Ellen: It's more bilingualism. I mean, we have the same monolingualism problem in rural Quebec except it's French monolingualism. So it's an issue even throughout the country. Does French immersion succeed in promoting bilingual citizens? Yes. Do all kids in French immersion become bilingual? Absolutely not. Categorically not. Do they achieve native-like fluency? Rarely. But it's okay. We've studied French immersion a number of times over the years and compared the kinds of bilingualism that come from French immersion. We compare kids who've gone through French immersion programs and adults who had learned their other language in French immersion and they pretty much look like bilingual. So it is effective. It does make you bilingual. The thing is you need ongoing use and exposure. We did a study a few years ago where we compared... Well, these were all undergraduate students here. So they were all around 20 years old who were monolingual and defined as almost no other language; bilingual because they had gone through French immersion and kept it up, so they were now university students but they kept up their French and so they were French-English bilingual; and this group that we called lapsed bilingual. These are kids who went to French immersion until about Grade 6, so they had like six good years and then they never used it again. And we gave them our battery of cognitive tasks. Here's what we found. When you compare the monolinguals and the bilinguals, we got our usual results. Bilinguals were better. So what about these lapsed guys? Now, they had about six years in French immersion and then about six years where they spoke or saw no French and they were right in the middle. Not significantly different from either. My guess is if we would come back in another six or 10 years, they would gradually be slipping towards the monolinguals. So it requires constant use and practice and exercise.

Cameron: Right. One of the things that I noticed in your work was that you've talked about how the effects of bilingualism on the remodeling of the brain, the development of gray matter and white matter, continue through life. They're not something that's just set up in childhood as you're learning those languages. But the more you use them and as you continue to use them, throughout your life those effects are measurable in the brain.

Ellen: I think it's also important to say here that these effects come from the language environment and not necessarily language proficiency. And the profound example of that is some incredible work with infants in the first year of life who are raised in environments where they hear either one or more than one language. So these are infants, they speak not a word, and they're just being raised in these different environments. And some remarkable studies by various groups have shown that on certain kinds of attention tasks – there's that word again, selective attention – the babies being raised in bilingual environments show better attentional control than their counterparts in monolingual environments.

Cameron: Even before they learn to speak.

Ellen: They speak not a word, they're six months old, seven months old, eight months old, and it's just the environment that they're attending to. The thing is they know exactly that there are two languages. They know that from the moment they're born. There're studies that show at the moment of birth, the newborn infant, two hours old can tell the difference between languages they heard in utero and language they did not. So these are different systems all ready. So then you go into an environment where they're raised and they're hearing one language or more than one language. They know there's two languages there and they attend to them differently. And by six, seven, eight months old in various kinds of attention tasks, the babies in those bilingual environments have better attentional control.

Cameron: These results have phenomenal implications for public policy. Do you as a well established senior academic, do you get a chance to actually directly participate in policy, like advisory roles with government or anything like that? Or are you just dropping your research out there and hoping they pick it up?

Ellen: I would love to talk to policy people, but basically they don't ask. I don't know how to knock on their door. I had one experience with a policy group in the US where I was invited to a meeting, presented some stuff. They were putting together a book that would be given to policymakers looking at these issues and they decided they didn't like what I had to say and my work was not included in the book.

Cameron: Oh my, that's an awful note to end on. I want to wrap up our interview, but it's such a downer.

Ellen: It's very hard. It's very hard to break through policy, especially when policy is based on preconceived ideas. People don't make policy. People don't say, "Well, let's make the best possible policy for environment or education or language and we'll start by going out and getting all of the best evidence and then decide what the policy will be." It's usually the other way around. So the policy is in place and then they look for things that they believe supports the policy. I do speak to educators and that is more productive and I enjoy speaking to educators. I've developed certain relationships with these big international schools that are struggling with issues of language instruction and bilingualism and language policy within the narrower context of education and that's a more productive relationship.

Cameron: It's been fascinating to talk to you. I'm really looking forward to getting back in the classroom when my sabbatical is over. I'm going to teach all my students about accounting as a second language and what it's doing to their brain. Thank you Ellen for taking the time to be here today.

Ellen: Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure.

Cameron: Pleasure for me too. Thank you.

Links

Prof. Bialystok’s Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab at York University

All about the Stroop test

Credits

Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: York University, and Eugen Sakhnenko at Worker Bee Supply
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: May 14, 2019
Location: York University

Photograph by Worker Bee Supply. Used with permission.