Psychology professor Ellen Bialystok is one of five scholars to be awarded this year's Killam Prize in recognition of her work, which has focused on language acquisition and how bilingualism affects brain development. Prof. Bialystok talked to The Globe and Mail about the dynamics of research, how some ideas have to find their time, and her future projects.
How significant is it as a researcher to receive a $100,000 prize? That seems like a lot of money.
As a research prize it is enormous. It really is unprecedented in academia to give such a large prize for a body of work. It doesn't have any restrictions on it. I can use it as I decide to. I haven't given that much thought. I have a very active lab. We are in the middle of between 15 and 20 different projects.
How do you decide as a researcher what area you will examine next? How much of it is intuition?
Research moves forward in teeny-weeny steps and then sometimes at the end of a very long journey that could last 10, 20, 30 years, these steps produce something that seems to be incredible. You look at that last step and say, "wow, that's amazing." You forget about all the steps that led up to it. This is the real art of research, knowing how to stay on the path and follow the evolution of an idea through all of its twists and turns. When we look at a research finding as a breakthrough, for the person who found it, it is anything but a breakthrough. It is years of tedious small steps.
I s there a finding that you have made that you would put in that category?
In some sense all of them.
What about the link you found between bilingualism and warding off the effects of Alzheimer's?
The research on dementia was a real flyer. We had done work on bilingual children and adults. We thought the chances of it working were small, but we got very powerful results.
I'd been doing research for a long time and it wasn't particularly noticed. At some point we began to change our ideas about the mind - that the mind really does reflect new learning into adulthood. So it became more interesting to think that an experience like bilingualism could have an effect. I had been saying these things for a long time, and quite honestly nobody believed it. Now we understand that the mind is much more flexible than we thought.
There is now a wonderful body of research on this thing called cognitive reserve. That's the idea that you can put cognitive fuel in the tank through stimulating activity. This is all the stuff you hear about doing crossword puzzles. It really works. There is really wonderful, elegant research showing that cognitive reserve enables people to function at a higher level. Nobody has the slightest idea why it works, but it is possible to maintain a higher level of cognitive functioning through stimulating activities.
So a number of things come together to give a particular research finding or area more currency.
What are the next questions you are thinking about?
We have to start seriously tackling "how come?" We know very little about the why. The other thing we are looking at is the process. We have always looked at bilingual people versus monolingual people. Now we are looking at people in the process of becoming bilingual. How bilingual do you need to be to see benefits? These are all the messier questions that you can ask once you are confident about the initial finding. We are now looking at kids in immersion programs. We are looking at people in the process of becoming bilingual and hoping that we can extract some pattern.
Have you taken any wrong turns?
I have cabinets full of research that will never see the light of day. You have to be flexible. You have to recognize when a path isn't yielding what you thought. I have radically changed my view on all sorts of things. When it is clear you need a different kind of model you have to be willing and able to change.
How did you end up interested in research?
How does anything happen in life? I subscribe to the chaos theory on this one. It's not like I sat down at any point in my life and said this is what I will do. It's a bit like the research process. You follow each thing and end up someplace without really knowing how you got there. I graduated in 1976 and there were no academic jobs. I ended up working on a research project looking at second language teaching in schools. That was my first exposure to these issues.
Are you bilingual?
Not as much as I would like to be. I have a bilingual grandson, and my daughters are bilingual.