Please help with topic phrasing

[fali2009]

Hello everyone, please help me out with my topic in psychology for the extended essay

Im looking to write my extended essay on "The difference between bilingual and multilingual persons in terms of (this is where i have trouble) meeting new people and being social /understanding different cultures and personalities.

The end part of the research question is obviously where i need help on but i just dont know how to phrase that.

thanks in advance

[sweetnsimple786]

What do you mean by the slash? That you want to say either the phrase before it or after it?

in terms of how they socialize or how they adapt to new situations or in terms of how they interact with strangers

/

how they perceive foreign cultures

[fali2009]

in terms of how they socialize or how they adapt to new situations / how they perceive foreign cultures

[sweetnsimple786]

I'm sorry but what does that mean? Will you be using those phrases? Do you want more help?

[Vvi]

Is there really a big difference between bi- and multilingual people in terms of social skills? Have you researched the topic to make sure there is a difference, or did you just pull it out of thin air? And how would you define the difference between a bilingual and a multilingual person? Bilingual people are multilingual. By multilingual, do you mean people that speak 3+ languages? What is the cut-off point for determining when a person is fluent in a language and can be considered to speak it well enough to count it in their list of languages they speak? I think there are too many questions that arise from your topic.

A better direction to approach it from might be the investigation of the differences in social skills between monolingual and multilingual people. But how are you going to measure the difference? Are you going to use people as test subjects in different situations and see how they react? I think that the impact of culture is far stronger than that of language in determining social skills. To be honest, I think a new topic would be the best idea. This one isn't very clear.

If you want to investigate language and social skills, why not do something connected with autism. Autistic people have poor social skills and often can't express themselves well in words. They communicate their needs in other ways. Autism is still relatively unknown in the scientific world because it's causes aren't known, and so I think it would be a good area of psychology to study as it will be original.