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."

Comments

I majored in applied linguistics...

[xtremex]

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).
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-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!
OK..my diatribe is over :)