The bilingual advantage: it's how you measure it

Ainoa APARICIO Fenoll and Zoe Kuehn ()
Additional contact information
Ainoa APARICIO Fenoll: University of Turin

JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics, 2025, vol. 91, issue 4, 663-682

Abstract: We use data on Latino children in the United States who have been randomly assigned calculation tests in English or Spanish to check for the so-called bilingual advantage, the notion that knowing more than one language improves individuals’ other cognitive skills. After controlling for different characteristics of children and their parents, as well as children's time in the US, we find a bilingual advantage among children who read or write in English and Spanish but not for those who only speak or understand both languages. In particular, bilingual readers or writers perform one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation better than monolingual children, equal to learning gains of an additional school year. Applying the Oster test, we find that selection on unobservables would need to be 3–4 times stronger than selection on observables to explain away our results. The bilingual advantage is stronger among children in two-parent households with siblings and for those at the upper end of the ability distribution.

Keywords: Bilingualism; Cognitive skills; Measurement; Selection on observables and unobservables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I24 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2025.3 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Bilingual Advantage: It's How You Measure It (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvde:v:91:y:2025:i:4:p:663-682

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics from Cambridge University Press Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sebastien SCHILLINGS ().