See attached publication. I my opion it is true but only if you have constant contact with foreigners and opportunities to travel.

http://cecerdll.fpg.unc.edu/sites/cecerdll.fpg.unc.edu/files/imce/images/%232817_ResBrief%237_FinalRvsd-2.pdf

 Dear Mr. Wolk,

Thank you very much for sharing the article; it's interesting indeed.

Cameen

Dear Cameen, I agree that most of the time, bilinguals have better social skills than monolinguals.  Bilinguals have invested time and effort to learn the second language, L2, and also the culture of that L2.  Here L2 is English.  It's quite fun to learn that in that culture, we eat with a fork and knife and there is a particular way utensils are placed, and we should drink the soup without slurping.  (Here, we eat simply with just one fork or one spoon or a pair of chopsticks.  So it's necessary to learn table manners of the English when we learn their language and must socialize with them.  The result is better soft skills.)

http://www.learnenglish.de/culture/eatingculture.html

Yes, definitely. But one language  must be English. 

Yes, definitely. But one language  must be English. 

Yes, definitely. But one language  must be English. 

I agree with your findings because Bilinguals have better cognitive skills, something more social and explain their facility in adopting another perspective. They show definite advantages over monolingual:-

1 Bilingual people are more creative and flexible in their thinking.

2 Bilingual people demonstrate greater awareness of language and how it works.

3 Bilingual people are more sensitive to nuances in communication.

4 Bilingual people are often able to orient themselves and detect hidden patterns and figures more easily.

I don't think that English is the important factor. Learning to live in an environment  where more than one language is spoken is the important factor.

In order to communicate well, one has to come to the realisation that there are completely different contexts for language and actions..These contexts give meaning to language and action which other wise might be difficult to understand.

Experiencing this provides..or rather demands that the listener/observer try to understand that other people might have a different point of view.  Indeed, the language that is spoken will set the context and the meanings in communication.

Although some people think that English is the same everywhere, millions of people would not agree. 

English English is quite different from American English or Canadian English, or Australian English or English spoken in India and other places.

A variety of English is spoken in many different other places - each with its own set of contexts and specific meanings, vocabulary and ideas as to what  to say and think and how to behave within a wide variety of contexts - many of which do not and can not occur everywhere..

It seems to be true not only due to increased audience rather due to increased understanding of others' perspective. As I believe that every language has its own structure and form which better explains perspective of the people who speak it, that can't be translated in to other language. But at the same time social skills are much more than language only. Some time bilingualism may rather hinder the interaction due to lack of complete communication for none of the pure language speaker in absence of expression, gestures and other instruments of social skills.

Of course modern Human needs to know several languages. But one of these languages must be the language of our ancestors. We must of course pay tribute to those who owe our own lives.

 Thank you for asking this interesting question, Cameen. Not only does learning another language add to one's cognitive potential, but learning another language is a way of understanding another culture and another perspective beside that of ones own unthinking habits of mind. Each language learned adds to our awareness of points of view other than only one. This can help make us more socially respectful and grant us the necessary tolerance and humility to enjoy a wider circle of friends around the world. It enables a new benefit,  especially for those of us in a social and professional group such as Academia.edu. With best wishes, Kay

I believe that bilinguals have more social skills than monolinguals. Since bilinguals have the ability to speak in two languages, they are able to have a wider perspective to see the world and their surroundigs. The more languages one knows, the more tolerant and social one becomes. Knowing other languages make us communicate with more people.

Dear everyone,

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on the question. I've learned a lot from your perspectives.  Thank you again.

Sincerely,

Cameen

Hi Cameen

Thanks for sharing this interesting article. The conclusion does ring true for me, but I noticed that it only discussed children and I think we can only relate the findings to children. Once people are adult whether bilingual or monolingual, there could be all sorts of other factors operating that might influence their readiness to interact socially. Perceptions of social status, gender, self esteem, interpersonal factors might affect their social skills and make them respond differently in social situations according to their comfort level with other interactants. Children may well be more spontaneous and less self-conscious. Adults who are bilingual or multilingual could have greater capacity as regards social skills but may not always demonstrate this capacity. 

However I can't actually cite any evidence for this - just my observation from lots of years of working with a range of language learners!!

Terima kasih ini pertanyaan yang menarik dalam kajian linguistik. Saya setuju bahwa Bilingualis memilki keunggulan dalam hubungan sosial dibanding monolingual, karena bilingualis biasanya hidup dalam masyarakat multilingual & multikultural. Oleh karena itu dia harus memahami sosial budaya masyarakat multilingual tersebut. Kita mengetahui bahwa bahasa tidak dapat dipisahkan dari budaya pemakai bahasa. Semakin banyak dia belajar bahasa maka semakin banyak pula dia harus memahami konteks sosial bahasa tersebut. Dengan demikian dia akan semakin kaya pengetahuannya dalam berinteraksi dengan lingkungannya.

 Dear Ms. Malthus,

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts about the article and my question.     I agree with your observation.

Sincerely,

Cameen

Dear Mr. Haryono,

I did use Google Translate.  Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Cameen

These studies have shown that children who live in multi-lingual environments have the capacity for understanding different points of view, and dealing with life in a more creative manner.

This does not guarantee that all of these individuals do exhibit increased understanding, etc.   There are always exceptions to the rule.

It would be interesting if people who write in share their -lingualism, and what the two languages (or more) are.  I have studied a lot of languages, but am mostly monolingual English (American) speaking.  My grandson, who lives in Amsterdam, is bilingual in English (his mother's mother tongue) and Dutch (his fathers father tongue).  I find it easy to get into a new language, but am definitely not a symmetrical bilinguist. (or whatever the word is for a person who is equally fluent in both languages.

I agree with Cameen that Google translate performed admirably in translating akhmad's discussion from Malay to English.  GT has come a long way - did anyone else try it on another target language?  How did it perform?

I have lived for some time in societies where I spoke English (several varieties) and Brazilian Portuguese (different from Portuguese Portuguese).

The crucial point is to be able understand why people think and act one way or another, and not just the words 'strung like pearls in a sentence'. ...

Google is ok as a word for word translation machine, most of the time.

But it can not indicate the deeper meanings that come from a deeper human understanding of the social world that constructs the language...

Yes, I know.  I don't think GT is a word-by-word translator any more.  They probably have corpora of text to compare with and get fairly close to the meaning now.  I was expecting much worse.  It seems it has improved from the early days.

well. it is handy but I still prefer a human translator.      :>)

I realize that some people are probably tone deaf so that makes learning languages somewhat difficult.  It really helps to live somewhere where you have to be the person who buys the milk and bread...learning to ask for it in another language is a great, if 'brutal' way to learn another language.

I think that it is an huge advantage if the idea of different sounds and worlds has been 'planted' in one's head at an early age...

I know some people who can't hear musical sounds (from their own society) well enough to copy them. Sadly they have difficulty learning to speak another language well, although reading and writing is a possibility.

When my kids were little I would from time to time insert nonsense words using various sounds from real languages that I found slightly harder to make.  They quickly learned how to make those sounds.  They learned several languages as they went on.  So I agree with your assessment that learning articulatory phonetics at an early age (maybe starting about 6 weeks) helps later language learning.  At least the phonetics wasn't a big hurdle.

For languages with a significant amount of information on the internet, GT, at the minimum, would be using a moving window co-occurrence frequency process.

This means that for each word GT has calculated the likelihood, for each other word in its dictionary, what word (Na) will appear right after it (Na+1), two spaces after it (Na+2), 3 spaces (Na+3), 4 spaces (Na+4), 5 spaces (Na+5). Then it makes a temporary translation using the most likely words in those spaces.

It then moves to the next word (Nb) and does the same thing. If that next word wasn't what GT originally assigned, it will change its temporary translation to the actual word, and do the calculations based on that.

GT now has temporary translation candidate words for Na and Nb that overlap for the next 4 words, while the word at space Nb+5 has only one candidate. It uses a weighting process to revise the temporary translation for those 4 words, and produces a new unified temporary translation.

GT does this for whatever the window size is. Since the possible number of entities that can appear in each space is huge, the window size will be small.

Also, if you want to have your translation system revise earlier words (i.e., your window moves forwards and backwards) you still have the processing power limitation on your window size so that whatever is the maximum size must be split between each direction.

Having a moving window that only goes forward is very common.

What this means is that if there are many words in between words that are linked in an important way, like German clauses where the first part of the verb phrase appears at the beginning and the rest appears at the very end, or where a suffix detaches from a verb and moves to the end and essentially turns into a preposition, translation will be flawed.

GT will also have trouble with pronoun assignment. Since the pronoun referent is based on the contents of the moving window, GT will have trouble holding on to the link between a specific name and the pronoun that was used to refer to it unless the link is repeated frequently. This will be a bigger problem if a pronoun can have two or more referents depending on the context, like Dutch "zij" can mean "she" or

"they" (sometimes "it" or "those").

The larger problem is that you can't go back and change things outside of the window based on new knowledge gained. A human can revise their interpretation of a word that appeared paragraphs or pages previously based on a new insight they get from distant content. GT can't change the meaning of a word that appeared several sentences previously based on the content of the moving window currently.

What this means is, contrary to much of human text interpretation, a translation by GT or another machine translation program will tend to become more wrong as the text translated gets longer. Prepositions and pronouns will change meanings based on the current set of 5 words, not based on what they meant in the previous paragraph. Words with multiple meanings will be translated into different meanings based on the current context. Low frequency words will not have any strong links to other words, so the probabilities assigned become essentially guesses.

But it is most certainly not word-by-word, especially for languages that are well represented on the internet. And it should be able to recognize large chunks of text that are readily available as translations, like sections of famous books, or the entire book.

However, claiming that bilingual people have better social skills based on what a few dozen children and infants do on some basic perspective-taking tasks is absurd.

while I thank you for your assessment of Google's Translator, I don't think that you quite understand the differences of perception that are available to people who THOROUGHLY fluent  in other languages. 

As to the positive effects on small children of either living in a mutlilingual environment...there are many studies of this.

 This adds up to more than a 'few dozen children and infants" involved in this assumption

The problem lies in assuming that bilingual people always have better skills than mono-lingual..

Bilingual people can not  be relied on to have perfect manners or perfect diplomacy by virtue of their linguistic abilities.

The perception - gained by learning about a second world - might offer the possibility of being more socially empathetic or skillful..but it is no guarantee of that talent.

 After all all of us are human.   Learning about another society through language only gives one  the opportunity to learn that the world is a different place,  depending on the language that one speaks. 

It is certainly doubtful that all bilinguals exhibit delicate diplomacy when it comes to dealing with people at any and all times. 

Language encodes concepts and beliefs "about the nature of the world." . These concepts are not uniformly distributed around the linguistic universe....

The only way into another world is through the language that it uses.

I am actually very familiar with the wide assortment of claims made about the benefits of knowing more than one language, and I am one of those people. I also have discussed this subject many times, as it is a favorite among the folks at the Applied Linguistics group on LinkedIn.

To be brief, I think that research demonstrating positive effects of knowing additional languages is inadequate with regard to attribution of these effects specifically to language knowledge rather than as effects of advanced knowledge of multiple kinds, or in general.

For example, just about everything people who are fluent in more than one language say about its impact on understanding the world, on having another life, and whatever other metaphors you might want to use, people who have acquired "fluency" in mathematics will say about mathematics, or physics, or the combination of both.

Many mathematicians and physicists will go further and will claim that math is the true universal language, of humans, and of reality. I have seen interviews with multilingual mathematicians and physicists who make this claim.

And who are linguists to challenge them unless people who are fluent in math are tested in comparison to people who are fluent in more than one language? The mathematician will claim that the bilingual can't understand unless they are thoroughly fluent in math with equal certainty as the bilingual who claims that the mathematician can't understand without being thoroughly fluent in another natural language.

The claim that language is the cause of observed effect is particularly problematic with regard to generalized effects such as advanced executive functioning and resistance to age-related cognitive decline.

But mathematicians have their own culture, and you will not learn it unless you learn advanced math. I am not one of those people, my math stops a calculus, which is 400 years old or so, and while my understanding of the findings of physics research is very good, I rarely delve into the primary literature, and will not pretend to understand most of the equations.

I know people who are professional physicists, though, and I have no reason to think that their interpretation of the world, and the changes in their mental functioning, are any less than those claimed for knowledge of an additional natural language.

I also have no reason to think that people who are fluent at interacting with information technology systems, with the ability to manipulate them at an advanced level through various coding languages do not acquire similar abilities as people with understanding of an additional natural language.

The same is true for skilled musicians, dancers, visual artists.

Then there are advanced systems of knowledge that are nominally within a specific language, but require a combination of specialized language and behavior. I believe that my experience as an attorney is at least as impactful on my cognitive abilities and on my view of the world as learning an additional natural language. I also believe the same is true for my experience in psychology.

So I don't think that language is anything particularly special. I think that the acquisition of advanced knowledge that permits a person to engage in comparison of multiple basic aspects of reality from different perspectives is the main cause of the effects observed. Language probably has certain effects that music does not, but music probably has certain effects that language does not.

The ability and desire to manipulate quantity, sound, vision, and the body are at least as innate as language. I also suspect that you could find results similar to the results obtained with the infants with social non-human primates, and probably the one with the children with chimpanzees and bonobos.

And for a bit of fun, the file attached is a Google-translated English version of a German news article about automatic translation. The translation of the introduction is not so impressive, and things get worse. But right away we have a pronoun-matching and a preposition problem.

"Wenn zwei sich nicht verstehen, weil sie verschiedene Sprachen sprechen, wäre ein automatisches Übersetzungsprogramm eine feine Sache. Aber Sprachen folgen eigenen Regeln. Kann der Computer da mit?"

"If two do not understand because they speak different languages, an automatic translation program would be a fine thing. But languages will follow its own rules. Can the computer there?"

German original version is here:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/leben-gene/der-automatische-uebersetzer-was-sagt-der-professor-da-nur-13533200.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_1

 Dear Ms. Colson and Dr. Polichak

I do appreciate your sharing some insights regarding GT and my question. I've learned a lot from your discussions. Thank you very much again for sharing these thoughts and also the link + article.

Sincerely,

Cameen

Dear Dr. Stoica,

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on my question.

Sincerely,

Cameen

Dear Cameen,

I know that research has shown that executive functions are better in bilingual students

In the NYT the author describes bilingual babies who can hardly talk .To see something from somebody else’s perspective is related to flexibility, which would, in these babies’ case, end up being socially flexible.

I think that being better in social skills would be more related to sympathize with others and being flexible at the same time.

I see this more related to flexibility than to better social skills. Social skills involve other aspects, I think.

Terima kasih ini pertanyaan yang menarik dalam kajian linguistik. Saya setuju bahwa Bilingualis memilki keunggulan dalam hubungan sosial dibanding monolingual, karena bilingualis biasanya hidup dalam masyarakat multilingual & multikultural. Oleh karena itu dia harus memahami sosial budaya masyarakat multilingual tersebut. Kita mengetahui bahwa bahasa tidak dapat dipisahkan dari budaya pemakai bahasa. Semakin banyak dia belajar bahasa maka semakin banyak pula dia harus memahami konteks sosial bahasa tersebut. Dengan demikian dia akan semakin kaya pengetahuannya dalam berinteraksi dengan lingkungannya.

Do you agree with the finding that bilinguals have better social skills than monolinguals? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_you_agree_with_the_finding_that_bilinguals_have_better_social_skills_than_monolinguals/2 [accessed Mar 18, 2016].

The crucial point is learning more than one way to communicate, more than one set of sounds, concepts , communication tools, etc. creates a more complex set of nureons and synapses in the brain.

This is because when more than one language and social system is learned by someone, it has been discovered that  the brain accommodates these two 'systems' of language (sounds and their related conceptual worlds) by wiring itself with more complex networks of synapses in which to store and 'operate' these modes of communication and behaviours.

Indeed, children who have learned to recognize a wider selection of language sounds are shown to be more flexible learners.

People who have learned to live in more than one social world have shown that they are in many ways more sensitive to these differences and they are sometimes more tolerant of other people...

It has been shown that some cases stroke victims who are not mono-lingual, are more able to return to a 'more normal' mode of life because their brain can repair itself by using the 'second' set of neural networks to by-pass the damaged areas..

So in the process of learning, indeed all learning, the brains changes ...possiblities increase..

This doesn't guarantee that all people with increased language and social learning with be wonderfully flexible or tolerant of others, or indeed, socially adept.

What it does suggest is that the capacity to be more flexible and 'understanding' is probably greater.

.

The challenge for research on bilingualism are the multiple confounds. If a difference is found and if the difference is significant, can the difference be explained in terms of language or culture? Is there something about learning a new language, or a second language, that changes someone's personality in measurable ways or do these findings all fall under the rubric of "individual differences?" My dissertation -- Bilingual Decision Making -- faces some similar challenges. If decision making for first- and second language speakers is found to be significantly variant, then is there a language or cultural explanation? The most interesting preliminary finding is that second language speakers seem to be better at answering questions for which there is either a) an easy intuitive answer that's incorrect, or b) a harder, less-intuitive answer that is correct. 

Good conversation. 

 Dear Dr. Brooks,

Your work sounds very interesting.  Is there any chance for me to read it somehow?  

Sincerely,

Cameen

Yes, Dr. Brooks - if you could give us a link to your publications? And thank you for the question, Cameen.

 Dear Dr. Maltseva ,

You're very welcome.

Sincerely,

Cameen

Hello Natalia and Cameen,

In my dissertation I examine bilingual decision making in three parts. 

1. verbal probabilities (see link below)

2. ethics

3. cognition

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281176705_Bilingual_decision_making_a_verbal_probability_study

I have submitted parts #2 and #3 for publication but I can send summaries in the meantime. 

Zach

Article Bilingual decision making: a verbal probability study

Many thanks, Zachary! Summary on Cognition would be great too, but then I won't be able to cite it before it is published, right? I'll watch you publications)

Dear Dr. Brooks,

Thank you very much for kindly sharing your work; it's very interesting. I look forward to reading more of your publications when they are ready. Thank you very much again.

Sincerely,

Cameen