RA: Cummins and Gulutsan

They make the argument that those who speak a second language will be better at "objectification" and creating "sets." They go through a couple of studies that they did, where they give an operational definition of the concepts "set" and "objectification" and explain how these studies would be good ways to measure such things. For their studies, "set" is to be thought of as "the underlying dimension which integrates all the psychological processes and behavior of the individial." They measure levels of mental activity. Their conclusions are that "bilinguals performed at a significantly higher level than unilinguals on both verbal and non-verbal intelligence measures was attributed to the fact that becuase bilinguals have two words for the same reference they objectify both their linguistic operations and the conceptual features of the external environment more efficiently than unilinguals." I believe that their argument worked for their audience, especially as their audience was probably a bunch of dry old ostentatious intellectuals who needed some type of scientific study to justify any type of political conversation over some snobby wine-filled, cigar smoking social hour at the country club.