Theory and research on bilingualism and its relationship to cognitive development have provided mixed results, especially in relation to the value of United States bilingual education programs. Little of the existing research on bilingualism is generalizable to U.S. minority language groups. However, one study of children in a bilingual program designed to see if intellectual abilities are related to the student's degree of bilingualism rather than to compare bilingual and monolingual children found that a positive relation exists between bilingualism and various abilities, such as the ability to think abstractly about language and to think nonverbally. In addition, the correlation between the students' abilities in the two languages developed in the bilingual education program became stronger in the course of the program, supporting the idea of the interdependence of the languages of the bilingual. While these results do not suggest that bilingualism is a valuable educational intervention strategy in itself, they do argue for increased research in cross-language skill transfer and the role of bilingualism in academic learning. (MSE)