As a previous reply said, that's a gross overgeneralization. The single biggest way that people become bilingual around the world is by living in community where more than one language is spoken (by immigration, by conquest, or by preexisting mixture of language groups), so there isn't any special selection of speakers by intelligence to find speakers who are bilingual. I have lived in a country in which the great majority of people are bilingual and some are trilingual, because the country had a government that imposed an official language on a population that was previously speakers of either of two languages--TWICE. (That is, twice the country was conquered by speakers of other languages, besides the two already there, and the school system was used to promote the invader's language(s).) Bilingualism is quite routine in many parts of the world. The submitted article's claim that growing up bilingual, as my wife did in the conquered country or as my children have in the United States, is beneficial may be true, but it would take gathering more evidence to show that most bilingual people are smarter than most monolingual people before the exposure to language-learning situations occurs.
I agree. Also at play is probably our cultural way of thinking about what "smart" constitutes.
Children absorb everything -- at their own pace, they learn how to walk, they learn their mother tongue etc, without parents "teaching" them by rote or by issuing instructions.
Likewise, if another language is used at home, children tend to pick that up too (to them its just a natural part of their environment).
In music, Suzuki (for example) was struck by how easily children acquire their mother tongue; he argued that if children were exposed to playing (violin eg) at an early age, as a natural part of their environment, they would acquire it as effortlessly as walking / mother tongue, without rote-teaching or even the concept of "music talent" being necessary. This seems to pan out in practice.
If there is a child who speaks two or three languages, and plays the violin, then our culture tends to consider this child "smart" (Or in the words of the article, perhaps not smarter but perhaps with an enhanced cognitive ability).
Does this say anything about intelligence? Probably not. But it does seem safe to say that the multilingual instrument-playing child will have some knowledge inside himself that skills can be acquired, and a confidence that comes from knowing he has done this before. And this will probably make learning easier / more fun in future.
As a previous reply said, that's a gross overgeneralization. The single biggest way that people become bilingual around the world is by living in community where more than one language is spoken (by immigration, by conquest, or by preexisting mixture of language groups), so there isn't any special selection of speakers by intelligence to find speakers who are bilingual. I have lived in a country in which the great majority of people are bilingual and some are trilingual, because the country had a government that imposed an official language on a population that was previously speakers of either of two languages--TWICE. (That is, twice the country was conquered by speakers of other languages, besides the two already there, and the school system was used to promote the invader's language(s).) Bilingualism is quite routine in many parts of the world. The submitted article's claim that growing up bilingual, as my wife did in the conquered country or as my children have in the United States, is beneficial may be true, but it would take gathering more evidence to show that most bilingual people are smarter than most monolingual people before the exposure to language-learning situations occurs.