This study aims to examine the relationship between bilingualism and critical thinking. Monolingual/bilingual individuals will complete an online questionnaire to assess their ability in 5 dimensions; hypotheses testing, verbal reasoning, judging probability, argumentation analysis and problem solving.
Included language sets: Irish, German, Japanese, Chinese. This makes findings of this research cover cross-language as well as cross-cultural differences.
The proposed project investigates the influence of bilingualism on critical thinking (CT) with the related goals of (i) clarifying the impact of dealing with two languages on an individual’s thought processes; (ii) examining for differences in CT as a function of language ability, while controlling for the languages examined in the study.
Despite the belief that bilingualism negatively influences the development of verbal skills, research has shown that there is a broad field within human cognition that does benefit from second language acquisition. Positive outcomes have been found in relation to many cognitive tasks, including attention and executive functions.
Studying diverse language pairings makes findings of this research cover cross-language differences as well as cross-cultural differences which is very unusual in the research area.
The study aims to control for language. This will ensure findings that lead back to differences in cognitive performance as opposed to performance which differs due to semantic/syntactic differences between two languages. English- Irish bilinguals will be one set of participants, alongside German- English, Mandarin Chinese – Japanese and Japanese– English bilinguals. To recruit and test bilinguals in these groups, research cooperations are agreed with Kyushu University (Japan).
An assessment has been put together built upon the theory and definition of CT of one of the leading researchers in the area, Diane Halpern. The assessment was translated into various languages and is now being distributed for data collection. Data collection in Ireland is nearly finished, still ongoing in Germany and just started in Japan and China.
The assessment consists of a language background questionnaire followed by the CT scenarios. It’s online (surveygizmo) and available to participants all over the world, advertised through a website (www.bilingualthinking.weebly.com).
Outcomes of this research aim to highlight the extensive positive role of growing up speaking two languages on an individual and societal level.