Differences between empirical results and positive spin

The ever bilingual-friendly Huffington Post recently reported on a new study in Frontiers of Psychology by a student of Judith Kroll, who is a noted figure in bilingualism and cognition. The HuffPost titles the piece, "Bilinguals Have Higher Level Of Mental Flexibility, Research Shows", clearly quoting a press release issued to psychcentral.com in which the reporter states that "Penn State researchers discovered that as bilingual speakers learn to switch languages seamlessly, they develop a higher level of mental flexibility" (emphasis added). However, the study itself (conducted with balanced Spanish-English bilingual adults) essentially indexed the response time of accurately reading cognates or non-cognates that were highlighted in a Spanish or English sentence. Cognates were read with faster response times than non-cognates, suggesting that bilinguals have both their languages active even when reading monolingually. However, nowhere in the study is there a comparison to, say, a monolingual control group that would allow one to conclude that bilinguals possess a "higher level" of mental flexibility. Rather, the results confirm existing notions of a common conceptual store of information that is equally accessible irrespective of language, and that bilinguals are linguistically unique language users.

I like positive press for bilingualism and its benefits, but sometimes it seems like ideology has us drawing conclusions that range outside the data.