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> I feel as if this has expanded my ability

What benchmark could you possibly have for this? You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like.



That's not even remotely close to being true. I have no more trouble imagining what monolingual me would have been like than I have imagining what color-blind me would have been like, or deaf me, or paraplegic me.

Imagining a deficit in one's abilities is not hard. It's going the other way -- imagining what it would be like to be able to do something that you have never done -- that is difficult.

(In fact, I don't even have to imagine. I know what it is like to learn a language as an adult, and how different that is from learning one as a child, because I've done both.)


The key word in your response is "imagine" which is literally all you're doing.


Of course. That is all anyone can do with respect to any counterfactual. So what? You were making a claim about the fidelity of my imagination:

"You have no clue what monolingual you would have been like."

And that's not true. I have several pretty good clues. Not only that, but what I imagine about the counterfactual me leads me to be able to formulate a testable hypothesis with respect to non-counterfactual situations, namely, that acquiring multiple languages in one's youth does afford some measurable cognitive advantages in general.

You can get a lot of leverage out of imagining things.




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