Bilingual Brain Explored 50
Aurorya writes: "Nature.com posts
this article about the this brain activities in bilingual versus monolingual people. The article states that when a bilingual person reads a list of words with one language in mind, the words are "heard" in the brain, and those words of another understood language or jibberish are ignored in the same way; the brain makes no effort to recall the meaning of the word in the other language. This is in contrast to monoligual folks, who search for meaning immediately."
Not surprised (Score:1)
Sounds about right (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I find that I start to think in French if I've been speaking it for a few hours. (If I was a troll, I'd make some remark about English, the more flexible language, being better suited to thought, which explains why we're so much smarter than them :) ) I don't do this on purpose, it just happens.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:1)
My wife is from Brazil, and doesn't speak English. We communicate in Portuguese, which I've been learning for the past three years.
I have found that an excellent way to practice my language skills is to attempt to do my thinking in Portuguese. It's not always easy, especially when I don't know the right word in Portuguese, but generally I can think a "concept" using smaller words.
My thoughts may seem like child's thoughts[1], in this respect, but everyone I talk to (in Portuguese) is amazed at how little accent I have. Some Brazilians have asked me where (in Brazil) I'm from! My grammar and conjugation give me away; I haven't had lessons (other than the "Better Off Dead" style < Howard Cosell> language lessons </Howard Cosell> ;-).
I also try to translate song lyrics, in real-time, as I listen to the song. It's not always possible, but it's a great way to flex my skills.
[1] - Children pick up language much faster than adults. Perhaps I've hit on something?
Re:Sounds about right (Score:1)
Re:Sounds about right (Score:2)
Re:Sounds about right (Score:1)
And yeah, it's hard to pronounce 888 in "civilized" Dutch (Dutch spoken in "Holland", the western part of the Netherlands), but I don't really see how you can find spies with that. Not everyone pronounces it the same and in the southern part of NL it's a "soft" g/ch instead of the hard/rough pronounciation in the north.
I can't completely agree (Score:2, Insightful)
"Those fluent in two languages rarely mix them up."
IANALR (I am not a linguistics researcher), but in my experience, most people always seem to be more fluent in one toungue than another. There are many bilingual individuals I've met who constantly jump back and forth between languages mid-sentence (especially when angry/ranting/upset). The article doesn't go into enough depth on this for me.
Is the entire study online? Anyone with a link?
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:3, Interesting)
My first language is Dutch, and I have been living in the USA for almost 6 years now. I don't consider myself to be 'truly' bilingual, since I only started learning English at age 8 or so.
Anyway, my experience is that people who speak two (or three, or more) languages well, generally do not mix them up. It's the people who are struggling with the 2nd language that are the ones that fall back on the 1st language when they get angry, emotional, or drunk.
Switching languages mid-sentence, sure, I've done that, but only when I wanted to. It usually happens when I speak Dutch to another Dutch person, and a non-Dutch speaking person joins the conversation. Out of courtesy, I then switch to a language that everyone understands.
Again, it depends on the definition of "bilingual". The article is less than clear about that.
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:2)
interesting. but not always. my japanese flows so naturally when I'm drunk (and I wouldn't even consider it a 2nd language for me... even after 4 years I still think of it as a hobby). no its not just my imagination either! the only time I seem to get compliments on my japanese speaking skills are when I have been drinking. I dunno if thats necessarily a good thing...
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:2, Interesting)
When I speak spanish, I revert to French for unknown words. When I try to speak Portuguese, I revert into Spanish. When learning a new language, the new language seems to start by sharing the memory space of an existing language. Then grandually the mind separates it into its own space.
I also find it extremely interesting how I learn differt computer languages. I programmed in Basic for years before moving to C++, Java, PHP and other languages. When I first started programming in c, I kept trying to do things the Basic way. It took a long time for c to separate into its own space. Oddly enough, when I wanted to learn Java, I was able to separate the two languages more rapidly, as if my brain remembered the problems I had with c and Basic.
I really don't think this phenomena is exclusive to language. When we launch into a new subject, our minds have to decide if it is something completely new (requiring a new memory space) or just a addition to stuff already on file.
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:1)
One of my funniest examples of mixing languages up was speaking English (my mother tongue) with a German accent after working for 2 weeks at a trade show in Duesseldorf...
Speaking French with a Quebecois accent after a week with a customer in Montreal makes perfect sense. I guess.
Yes, I sometimes dream in languages other than English.
Occasionally, just to screw around, I'll phrase things in English as literal translations from other languages - e.g. "I must get myself in gear the ass" and "By me there is a not-ness of coffee!" for "I must get my ass in gear" and "I have no coffee!" I leave the source languages as an exercise for the reader...
Languages are a goodness. They beat the hell out of card games.
...laura
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:1)
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:1)
Actually, French and Russian, respectively.
Consider the literal translations of the sentences Je dois me laver les mains ("I must wash my hands") and u myenya nyet dyeneg ("I have no money").
...laura
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:2)
Re:I can't completely agree (Score:1)
Of Filters and Black Boxes (Score:4, Interesting)
It has been many and many a year since I read the most part of what was then Chomsky's output on language but recall suggests his theory of transformational grammar might embrace something along the lines suggested in the article.
From the article: "Their studies of brain activity reveal that bilinguals reject words that are not part of the language they are speaking - before working out what the words mean."
"Bilinguals use a different processing pathway, the team suggests, which sounds out the word first. The fMRI images showed that a brain area involved in spelling out letters is active when rejecting Catalan and pseudowords. The pronunciation rules of Spanish or Catalan might work as a filter, recognizing words in the inappropriate language. Speakers switch filters when they switch between languages."
This begs the question of what the filter might be. Does any one language exhibit an underlying structure that permits a 'filter'? But then what of dialects? We know brain cells create new neural networks so it might be permitted to loosely conjecture the 'filter' as a different configuration of the cells in the language areas. I have yet to find any definitive work on how fast brain cells can realign and create new networks but my recent readings suggest new networks are generated much faster than once thought. Dropping all pretense of rigor or of any discipline, I'm of the opinion we'll find brain cell configuration and reconfiguration is the most underutilized and fundamental aspect of creativity and learning much akin to general suppleness of form.
Cheers thnx for the pointer.
Some additional thoughts (Score:4, Interesting)
Some years ago I was reading an interview with the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" fame), and he was describing how he was amazed by a relative of his, who was an interpreter, and who described her thought processes when translating. Turned out that what she described was completely alien to him, since he was strictly monolingual.
I was completely shocked.
Here's how Sacks' relative described it. If you speak more than one language, you don't simply think in "words". There's ideas, images, sounds, smells, and other harder to describe concepts. The process of translating is not a look-up process ("this word means that word", etc.). You need to absorb what is written or said in one language, translate that into ideas, concepts, emotions and what not, and then express those ideas in another language. You also have to place what you hear and say in the proper context. Often this has to be done 'on-the-fly', so the fact that multiple brain regions are involved doesn't surprise me.
What shocked me was that Sacks (and apparently a lot of monolingual people) didn't experience this at all! I was under the assumption that everybody's brain worked like this. So, apparently there is a lot of truth to the theory that language is a defining factor in structuring the human brain. According to the research, there is a significant difference between one and two languages, let alone the difference between zero and one language.
Re:Some additional thoughts (Score:2)
When studying foreing languages, I have seen that I have 3 "stages" of knowledge.
1- low. Speaking (or translation) is strictly word-by-word transfer from my main language, and works badly because many of the needed words in the new language are not known.
2- medium. Speaking/translation is mostly word-by-word, except for some well-know phrases (usually the expressions that don't match well between the two languages). It works slowly because translating is a look-up process, but it's reliable, i.e. unless you hit an unknown word you can easily map one word onto the other.
3- high. Speaking is done direct from ideas to words, I don't pass anymore from my main language. Translation becomes hard, since the look-up approach is lost and now it's necessary to "switch context" between one language and the other and see what concept is associated to which word in the two cases. The translation ends up being very non-literal, since phrases are translated in a single shot. Languages may be mixed up (intentionally) when a word in one language is more effective at describing one idea than any in the other language.
Re:Some additional thoughts (Score:2, Interesting)
The ideas in this thread also parallel the object-oriented concepts of separating representation from view, e.g. M-V-C. Seems natural that brains work that way for some processes.
Dual Speech (Score:4, Interesting)
The study results were interesting, but I would love to see more in depth analysis of this, or perhaps some further study info, etc. Anyone have anything?
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
This is extremely common, and linguists have a name for it -- it's called code mixing (or sometimes code switching).
When I speak with people who speak the same languages I do, I very often will mix languages; sometimes this is for convenience because one word describes what I mean better than another, but often it is simply a question of which word pops into my head, as it were.
Actually, when speaking English to someone, I will often mentally "reject" three or four candidate words that pop into my head as I speak, because they are in the "wrong" language. When given the freedom to code mix, I just turn this part of my brain off, and let whichever word comes into my head first be the one uttered.
What is more confusing to me is grammatical code switching -- whereby I unconciously choose the syntax (or sometimes even morphology) of a particular language while using the vocabulary of another. Inflection of English words according to French words, for example -- or even weirder, the replacement of English articles with French ones. The latter is strange because French articles are gender marked, and I find myself picking the "right" gender (according to French) while using an English word (which of course has no gender, ships not withstanding.)
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
According to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (and I'm sure other sources), there are almost switches in our brains for head-first or head-last grammar, nomative languages, the concept of dative, different pools for vocabulary, etc. I think code mixing is sort of like double-dipping, where you get the blue paint in the red jar, and you have to make efforts to get your pure red again.
Can you perhaps describe a situation in which you would want to code mix? (Besides for rhetoric or for entertainment purposes at linguistic cocktail parties...) I would feel so guilty doing it on purpose!
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
Perhaps it is good excercise for your brain, to keep variant languages distinct. This may increase mental capacity and flexibility, and may aid cognition in further pursuits.
As the parent described, code mixing can provide for greater expressiveness, as long as all codes are common among participants. Personally, I can't envision a circumstance where grammatical code mixing can be beneficial, unless obfuscation is the intended result. It would be a strectch, but perhaps there are circumstances where grammar mixing might overcome communicative deficiencies, perhaps because of the communications medium. This might become evident when considereing: a croweded environment full of interference; an echoing chamber, an electronic voice reproduction; and various forms of written communication. Again, this is highly speculative.
More feasible is vocabulary code mixing. Many languages have words for concepts that cannot be sufficiently expressed with native words, so foreign vocabulary is regularly adopted by natural languages. While vocabulary mixing may be subconsious in populations living along language-borders, there may also be instances of conscious efforts towards language unification. Esperanto is the most blatant example of this I am aware of, but it may also take place in communities with recent immigration.
In an academic environment, code mixing should definitely be avaioded unless a deliberate part of social research. Once you feel comforatble with the languages, and use then in non-academic situations, then it may be worth re-evaluating code mixing. As you are formally educated, it would be your responsibility to consider the intended audience's prior experience and understnding.
-castlan
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
For more information on the mixing of vocabularies with lots of immigrat populations, you should read The Language Instinct my Pinker. I think chapter 3 or 4, somewhere in the beginning, deals with that exact phenomenon, and it's REALLY interesting! Kids are amazing with it, in short.
Sometimes I wonder if, need I at some point turn off my anti-code-mixing brain part (say I get really drunk or in a sticky situation abroad) if anyone else would be able to understand it. Japanese, German, French? Who else knows German and Japanese? [siiiiiiigh]
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
Did you say that you are learning German, French and Japanese simultaneously? Which would you say has been hardest, or least difficult to learn? I always understood French to be just a metter of learning the vocabulary once the grammer was understood. On the other hand, I believe Mark Twain had some criticism regarding German "having more exceptions than rules".
One other thing, are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Theorem? It has been called by other names as well, but it basically specifies IIRC that expressive capability of a language can influence the range of the native speaker's thought. Have you found that you had ideas that you couldn't properly express before, that you now have the proper liguistic tools to vocalize? Or that with new language skills you have gained new insights and points of view that you didn't previously concieve? I guess I wonder how fluent you are with your languages... do you find you internally translate to/from English, or do you directly "think" in various languages?
Just as I side note, I would be really tempted to get you drunk just to hear what comes out of you.
-castlan
Re:Dual Speech (code mixing) (Score:1)
German you can probably read simple things after about a month of study because it looks like old-school Enlgish slang, but the word order is pretty different. It's very intuitive, but different from English. (Except for old phrases like "with this ring do I thee wed" and such.) So you have to translate more like sentence for sentence.
Japanese is a different beast. These people lived on their islands for thousands of years with very little influence and developed some really different things. Totalyl different from Chinese grammar structure. It's very simple. If any part of a sentence has been used recently except the verb (which is without fail at the end), you don't repeat it. So you ahve to translate paragraph for paragraph. Plus the yhave just as many idioms and little tricks as English, so exposure is the key.
Sapir-Whorf Theorem? I hadn't heard of that! When I get back from class (Japanese) I'll have to look it up. Actually, just the other day I discovered that the word for "lonely" in Japanese (sabishii) can be used for more than just people. Like if you're eating dinner and you want butter but there isn't any out, you are "lonely" for butter. So I was thinking that I needed something, but more in the "sabishii" sense than any sense you can come up with in Enlgish. I'm sure I would have had the same thought, but if asked to explain it, by filtering it through Enlgish i would have lost some of my original meaning. It's cool that you mentioned that just now!
And YES I get stuck in different languages, I was in a German swing all this week, dreaming in it, etc., which was great for German class, but awful for teh other two. I would just keep dipping into my German pools for Japanese words instead of just thinking in Japanese. (I've studied French for about 7 years so I rarely have a problem with it.)
blah blah blah me me me. Do you study languages? Maybe you should email me: phillipm@carleton.edu
My question on being bilingual (Score:2, Funny)
Note: in case anyone is wondering, me and my sister used to go out with large groups of both of our friends, and we practiced pig latin at home so we could have private conversations at these get togethers. Everyone knew we were using pig latin, but we are so fluent that no one was able to learn it from listening to us.
Re:My question on being bilingual (Score:1)
But, you should really have learned Japanese or something, back then. Far more useful in the long run
Re:My question on being bilingual (Score:1)
Re:My question on being bilingual (Score:1)
I majored in applied linguistics... (Score:5, Interesting)
But, when they learn English, they can comprehend finite mathematics. THAT's amazing. In their language, anything higher than 22 is called "more than 22". So, a million is "more than 22". I'm on a roll now. We're discussing the OTHER love of mine. Linguistically, they say that American Indians migrated from South America..not from the Bering Strait. South AMerican Indian languages disperse linguistically if you move north. While Athapascan languages (Iroquois) have ZERO similarity to Guarani (Bolivia), they have root words that are similar...like ?ge- for tree. In Guarani, ?ge- is the tree root, while in Iroquois it's ^hi (meaning wood). (g and h being related phenomes)
How about a relation to Latin and Eskimo(Inuit?). The word for single in Eskimo is tikitoq. tikit- being the root...digitus is "digit" in Latin...digit- being the root.. Coincidence? Maybe...
But only when you perform etymological work do you confuse languages. It's also easier to learn them, once you comprehend grammatical patterns. Grammar is the easiest part. Vocab is the hardest. Learn grammar first. Vocab can always be learned. (Just like programming languages).
But, Human languages are illogical. For example, Eskimo is an agglutanitive language (like Turkish or Hungarian)...Qingmiqataluktoq..
Qinqmiq-atalu-k-
OK..my diatribe is over
What about thinking without language? (Score:3, Interesting)
When people say they can't "hear themselves think," I don't know what to make of it. Does anyone else find that they don't think in any language?
Re:What about thinking without language? (Score:2)
Re:What about thinking without language? (Score:1)
Very cunning linguists! (Score:3, Funny)
Romance languages: Especially meaningful to anglos that don't speak them.(tm)
Re:Very cunning linguists! (Score:1)
Quite simple really, there are still millions of french-speaking canadians, so french doesn't sound exotic to canadians, while americans think it does 'cause they don't think of it as a national language, its foreign, so its sexy.
Its just a question of sounding romantic, foreign, exotic.
Language translations (Score:1)
I was fortunate enough to learn a second human language (German) in high school AFTER I had learned a couple computer languages. I had already gained experience in learning different grammars and vocabularies in simple (computer) languages before delving into another human language.
My German teacher stressed often that we were NOT to translate the German into English (my first language) to understand it. Let the mind THINK in German. I am so grateful for that exhortation!
Since then, I've programmed in about 20 other languages and spent two years testing a compiler, too. I often found myself thinking about how I thought in those different languages. Though I can't begin to explain the details to anyone, I came to an awareness that I had developed a meta-language of abstractions of concepts. (Analagous to the idea that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.)
While I was testing that compiler, I happened upon something that utterly fascinated me: translations of gibberish in English into other languages! That is, "Jabberwocky" [pair.com] by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). There is no possible literal translation, and yet when I read the German translation of it, I was amazed at how it had captured the "sense" of the poem -- rhyme, meter, even imagery! None other that Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote a lucid and illuminating piece on Translations of Jabberwocky [pair.com] -- it's a MUST READ!
For more fun, check out Jabberwocky Variations [pair.com] which contains links to translations in 29 different languages and 23 Parodies, too!
Anecdote: Japanese vs. Korean (Score:2)
My best language is English, by far, but I grew up with Japanese in the home. My Japanese vocabulary is small, so it's a common experience for me to hear Japanese and recognize it as Japanese, but to be unable to understand it fully because of my limited vocabulary.
Once, while flipping through TV channels, I came upon a newscast that was being given in Korean. I'm not sure if it was the person's accent, but it sounded just like Japanese to me. I listened for a good ten seconds firmly convinced I was hearing Japanese, and I could almost feel my language circuits spinning madly, trying to make syntactic sense of the sounds. All the while, I just thought it was another case of insufficient vocabulary.
Anyways, it took an astonishingly long time for me to realize that I couldn't even separate the sentences into their constituent words, let alone figure out what those words mean.
I'm really not sure how much I agree with the article, but my experience would suggest that the sounds of Korean were similar enough to get past this "filter," leaving me convinced I was hearing Japanese, and trying to establish the meaning of phrases I couldn't possibly understand.
Interesting.
Re:Anecdote: Japanese vs. Korean (Score:1)
Klingon is based on Athapascan and Georgian (Score:3, Interesting)
Not the vocabulary, but the grammar. The sounds are based on Georgian.When I first got the Klingon Dictionary, I noticed how familiar the grammar patterns looked to me. I whipped out my cherokee (tsalagi) grammar (don't ask
It literally made my BRAIN hurt contemplating that grammar! What the hell is a screeve???? (Any Georgian natives, please help me out!)
Franglais is frenglish (Score:1)
So anyways, there are englophones, and francophones, and there are a few people who consider themselves bilingual.
I never thought of those people as special, until I heard a couple of teenagers talk in frenglish: They were using an even mix of french and english, both in grammar and in vocabulary. Ok, so you'd think its just a bastard tongue, but the amazing thing is that they would switch from using a word in english or the same word in french, seemingly at randow, and they could just switch to any one of the 2 languages for a whole sentence sometimes.
I was quite fascinating to listen to (I speak both french and english, but I can't do what they were doing in that natural and very fast way that they were doing it, I could however, totally understand them, even though I could not talk like that!).
I can't even give you a text imitation of it...my brain can't merge the 2 grammars...
It was like the Bable Fish exploded...
PS Anybody feeling like a flame thrower about canadian politics: shove it. This post is about merging languages, not who's province as the ugliest prime minister...
Re:Franglais is frenglish (Score:1)
Re:Franglais is frenglish (Score:1)
Before I elaborate, let me describe where I live. My home of El Paso, Texas is the only major city in the U.S. that is directly across from Mexico. By that I mean that if you cross the bridge from downtown El Paso (or at another bridge) to Mexico you are in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Although there are middle and upper class people that speak Spanglish, it appears that the closer the person is to poverty (or maybe youth), the more likely the person speaks Spanglish. In one sentence alone you can hear English words, Spanish words, and "Spanglish" words said with both English and Spanish (or rather, American and Mexican) accents. By "Spanglish" words I mean words that are from English or Spanish but been assimilated into the other language, often using pronunciation rules from both languages, i.e. cake -> cayqui (but spelled cake).
It might be interesting to note the culture. As a 17 year old living in El Paso who just returned from a trip, I have noticed how all the cultures I'm exposed to have mixed. Culture has a new meaning where I live. Most of my community is affected by it. Sometimes we don't even know where a culture-related custom or idea came from. It is as if language and culture as clear-cut, distinctive entities don't exist.
other 'languages' we may speak but not realize (Score:2)
Hold on a sec, I am not here to present my life story just a thought; In all the years learning and unlearning languages I picked up a few others and this may shatter several of your impressions about yourselves being monolinguistic English only speakers;
If you are a coder you probably alrteady 'speak', 'read' and 'write' syntactically correctly in several 'foreign' languages like perl, C, VB, LISP, etc. I wonder how this would have affected the research. Any ideas from real linguistics folks out there???