Slashdot Mirror
Bilingual Brain Explored
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."
I'm really not surprised at this, although I do think its a cool 'feature' of the brain. Back in high school, I took 3 years of French. Sometimes it got to the point that I would think of and say a response in French before having translated it into English. It is actually a surprising and odd feeling at first, to find yourself thinking in another language. It does, however, make it easier to process speech if you dont have to translate twice before responding. I am really not very fluent in French, so I'm sure the effect is amplified for those who are truly bilingual. The fact that they've found a physical explanation for this is very interesting.
LOTR: Elijah Wood is a munchkin asshat. Yes, asshat. LOL.
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.
From the article:
"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?
My mother always used to tell me: If you can't find anything nice to say, say something bad about Windows.
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.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Not sure if this is offtopic, I think it's mostly on-topic, but anyway.
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.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
I am bilingual. Hindi is my 1st language, and English my 2nd (Spanish as a 3rd, but I'm not fluent in that). Anyway, I often, when talking to my parents or others who speak Hindi, will use both Hindi and English interchangibly mainly because there are certain things that are easier said or explained in one language over the other. There are some words that don't exist (a description does) in one language, so I would use the other. While I could speak stricly in one, it's easier to speak in both. I don't think about doing this, I just do. I would have to think harder to speak just in one language.
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?
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
English is my first language, pig latin is my second. I can speak fluent pig latin and understand it when spoken fluently. No, I am not joking. I can even use Google's pig latin translation with no problem, and occasionally do. The only thing I can't do well with it is type. Does this qualify me as being bilingual, or just truly bizaar?
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.
I have always loved languages and that is my second "passion" besides computers. I am fluent in 17 languages (reading and writing them..NOT speaking them). The first time I realized I could understand a language as well as I could with English is when I rented a foreign film in the mid 80's. It DID'NT have subtitles, but I thought they did. Because I was able to understand it. I THOUGHT it had subtitles...it was a very weird thing, because I lent it to a friend, and he told me there were none.I was shocked! Another thing that amazed me, was something like the Australian Aboriginal language Walpurgi. It has no concept of numbers higher than 22 (men count to 21, women count to 22...figure it out).t ok (I hit the dog)...[Dog-hit-past-active mood-present tense modifier]...string particles together to form a complete "thought". Very much like Java. But of course, there are MANY irrregularities. To native speakers, it just sounds wrong if it's spoken any other way...like saying "I eated". You understand it, yet it makes you chuckle. Americans have this bad habit of NOT correcting foreigners when they use the wrong terminology. I love it when I get corrected. I don't want to sound like a moron! :)
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
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I was born and raised in America, and I consider myself monolingual, though I have studied Spanish and Latin for 4 years each. My point is, I don't find that I "think" in any language, English or otherwise. This always made it harder to speak Spanish, because English is better suited to abstract imagery than the Spanish they teach you in high school. The way I find that I think is in images, both moving and still, and in order to communicate, I need to translate these images into a language (English).
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?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
...but have they managed to explain why French sounds sexy to Americans, whilst Canadians find Spanish more erotic, and both can think of naught but canned pasta in tomato sauce when they hear Italian?
Romance languages: Especially meaningful to anglos that don't speak them.(tm)
- undoware.ca
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" 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 -- it's a MUST READ!
For more fun, check out Jabberwocky Variations which contains links to translations in 29 different languages and 23 Parodies, too!
why only bi ? ...
... ... and when i write a comment i think in english ... it would be almost
... you make me feel wierdo with this article ...
/.
i read my native language estonian, english
and german without translating anything
it actually really is wierd when i think about it now, i don't translate most of the text to estonian if i read slashdot
instead i just read it
impossible too to get all sentences from estonian to english translated just like that anyway (too many structural differences)
eek
viva
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
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.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Klingon is based on American Indian Languages. Primarily Athapascan (Cherokee,Choctaw, Iroquois, et al). :)) and did a comparison. It was practically identical! To me, the majority of Native American languages have a more logical structure (yet so difficult, it'll make your hair fall out). On the topic of difficult languages, besides Native American languages (which definitely take the prize in complexity), I'd have to say Georgian is the most difficult language I've ever come across.
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!)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Here in canada, we got 2 national languages. Its not evenly distributed of course, most provinces have assimilated the french populations (or killed 'em or deported them, etc), others have been a bit annoyed at having the english invade them and have retaliated with french-protection laws. Lets just say that it makes politics entertaining :)
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...
You can't take the sky from me...
Ok, admittedly I speak three languages; English, Hungarian and Spanish (the Cuban flavor of it... and yes there is a big difference). So the monolinguist concept does not apply to me. I was born into a family where Hungarian was the primary language and I only spoke Hungarian until about 4. By the age of 5 I was completely bilingual (added English) and by 10 lost most of the Hungarian. At 28 Istarted to relearn my mother tongue and it was a very hard process. Spanish I picked up in jr high and high school but didn't use(and had to learn a different version than what I was taught in school) until I moved to Miami.
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???
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
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.)
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!
I suppose that your avoidance is a good thing, considering that one should learn rules, then understand those rules, before breaking them. IMO, this is the background that is commonly forgotten in the phrase "all rules are meant to be broken."
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
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]
I honestly don't know much about Japanese. But I suspect (just a hunch) that as long as you kept your verbs consistent, you could mix and match nouns and still come out rather understandable. Sort of like in "Jabberwocky". Hmm, let me change that... I can also see the inverse being true as well. I suppose it would matter the context of the situation, and the subject matter.
:D that sounds like fun! I'd wanna have a tape recorder handy, of course....
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
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