For several years now, headlines around the world have been trumpeting the cognitive control advantages enjoyed by bilinguals. As the story goes, a lifetime of experience selecting between two competing languages leads to improvements in control that generalize beyond the domain of language. It even protects the brain from the untoward effects of aging.

We developed the Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behavior Checklist for Junior Secondary School Students (BCL-JS) for teachers to rate the frequency of 52 reading-related behavioral characteristics of Chinese secondary school students. An item factor analysis based on ratings on 947 students yielded seven distinct dimensions. In a separate sample of 90 students, the seven constructs of the BCL-JS significantly correlated with students’ performances on most literacy and reading-related cognitive measures, and differentiated adolescents with or without dyslexia. Discriminant analysis showed that the BCL-JS had a high rate of correct classification (82.2%). These findings support that the BCL-JS is a reliable screening tool for Chinese junior secondary school students at risk for dyslexia.

The scientific process applied to any domain is a thing of power and beauty. It enables its practitioners to systematically and rigorously pursue questions of importance, in a manner that is, by necessity, adaptive and tenacious. As was his way with most matters of relevance to psychology, the words of William James (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) are illustrative here:

Un grand merci à Shari Baum and Debra Titone for their review paper, “Moving Toward a Neuroplasticity View of Bilingualism, Executive Control and Aging.” (Please note the code switch in that previous sentence is part of my effort to build my cognitive reserve.) The authors are to be congratulated for providing a timely and constructive review of the current state of our understanding of the potential impact of bilingualism on executive control processes and cognitive aging. In this short commentary, I will comment on one of their key contributions to the discussion, namely, that researchers should embrace and address the individual variability among bilinguals.