When I wrote this blog post about language and thinking, I genuinely thought hardly anyone would read it. It was a rather theoretical piece about language and thinking in adults. I posted it simply because I found the research extremely fascinating myself.
Well, I got that quite wrong. My inbox and social media feeds quickly filled up with questions and comments. So I thought I’d share some of my answers here.
Does this suddenly prove ‘visual thinkers’ exist?
Several people asked me whether the study provides evidence for the existence of so-called ‘visual thinkers’ or other learning styles.
The essence of my answer: (most) people can have mental images, but that does not mean that ‘visual thinkers’ exist as a distinct category of people. And the discussion behind the research in my original post is actually about something more abstract: what kind of representational system do we use when we reason logically?
The fascinating part is that we still don’t really know what that system is.
But didn’t we develop logical thinking through language?
I also received this question:
Didn’t adults first develop their logical thinking, which according to this study is less or perhaps not language-related, through language? And wouldn’t that mean it is still related to language after all? Either way, very interesting research, thank you!
My answer:
Yes, a very fair question, and this is actually one of the questions the researchers themselves explicitly leave open. They show that, in adults, natural language does not appear to be necessary for performing logical reasoning. But language may very well have played an important role in developing that ability. Based on this study, we simply don’t know whether children need language in order to learn to reason logically.
And what about multilingualism?
I also received a very interesting question from someone working for Wereldschool, which provides distance education for Dutch-speaking children living abroad. I have shortened the question slightly here:
One of the things we always explain to parents is that language development and cognitive development are linked. If you move abroad and don’t maintain your first language, your new language may not yet be sufficiently developed to support your cognitive development. In the worst case, this could eventually mean that, at a later stage, you struggle to explain concepts, for example at university.
A colleague of mine at a university in Qatar encountered this with Qatari students who had never developed either their English or Arabic sufficiently to describe and express the concepts they were expected to learn. Your blog made me wonder whether this is still something I can tell parents. I understand that you also explain at the end what the study does not mean, but I thought it was an interesting question.
My answer:
A really good question, thank you! I think you can still say much of this, but I would add one important nuance. As the new study shows, we cannot assume that cognitive and linguistic development completely overlap. Adults appear able to engage in formal logical reasoning without necessarily using natural language to do so.
But that does not mean that language cannot be crucial to the development of thinking. Quite the opposite: language helps us acquire, organise, remember and share knowledge, and can help us acquire abstract concepts. Moreover, this research does not tell us whether language is essential for children to develop particular forms of logical thinking. The researchers explicitly identify this as an open question.
So when talking about multilingualism, I think the main emphasis should be on the importance of having a well-developed language for acquiring complex knowledge and being able to express that knowledge. For children being educated in Dutch, for example, a strong command of Dutch is crucial. At the same time, a well-developed home language can be a valuable resource while learning another language and acquiring knowledge.
But I would be more cautious about the stronger conclusion that a child who does not have a sufficiently developed first language will therefore be unable to develop their thinking adequately. That is a much stronger claim. And this new research gives us an additional reason not to treat language development and cognitive development as if they were exactly the same thing.