Don't assume the behavior demonstrated in the article is an advantage...  The study compares <i>words</i>, not <i>people</i> -- particularly, it does not measure the speed of monolingual readers at all.<p>The article headline is jumping to a conclusion that its body does not support.  In fact, the body text is very careful not to claim any sort of advantage; the current headline is not the original one, and seems to have been chosen by someone not quite as careful as the article's author.  The subheadline, "Bilingual people process certain words faster than others", is also wonderfully ambiguous.<p>It is entirely possible that multilingual readers generally read slower, or that there exists a class of "anti-cognate" words that trip up multilingual readers as much as cognates help them.