Think your world view is fixed? Learn another language and you’ll think differently

Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost, and even protection against dementia. Now new research shows that they can also view the world in different ways depending on the language they are operating in.

In the past 15 years there has been an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

Just as regular exercise gives your body some biological benefits, mentally controlling two or more languages gives your brain cognitive benefits. This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: the typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals – and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer’s are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

In research we recently published in Psychological Science, we studied German-English bilinguals and monolinguals to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational, economic decisions in a second language

When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say, “A woman walks towards her car,” or “A man cycles towards the supermarket.” English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking,” or “a man is cycling,” without mentioning the goal of the action.

The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action.

The linguistic basis of this tendency appears to be rooted in the way different grammatical toolkits situate actions in time. English requires its speakers to grammatically mark events that are ongoing, by obligatorily applying the –ing morpheme: “I am playing the piano and I cannot come to the phone,” or “I was playing the piano when the phone rang.” German doesn’t have this feature.

In our study we also found that these cross-linguistic differences extend beyond language usage itself, to nonverbal categorisation of events. We asked English and German monolinguals to watch a series of video clips that showed people walking, cycling, running or driving. In each set of three videos, we asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman walks down a country lane).Research with second language users shows a relationship between linguistic proficiency in such grammatical constructions and the frequency with which speakers mention the goals of events.

German monolinguals matched ambiguous scenes with goal-oriented scenes more frequently than English monolinguals did. This difference mirrors the one found for language usage: German speakers are more likely to focus on possible outcomes of people’s actions, but English speakers pay more attention to the action itself.

When it came to bilingual speakers, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language context they were given the task in. We found that Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. But a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

In another group of German-English bilinguals, we kept one language in the forefront of their minds during the video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in either English or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of the other language to the fore.

These findings are in line with other research showing distinct behaviour in bilinguals depending on the language of operation. Israeli Arabs are more likely to associate Arab names such as Ahmed and Samir with positive words in an Arabic language context than in a Hebrew one, for example.

People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational, economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one’s first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. So the language you speak in reality can affect the way you think.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/27/world-view-learn-another-language

Life as a Bilingual

University of Houston professor, Arturo Hernandez, works on the underpinnings of bilingual language processing as well as second language acquisition in children and adults. He grew up speaking English and Spanish and acquired two other languages as an adult. A year ago, he published an important book, The Bilingual Brain, and he has very kindly accepted to answer a few questions about his work and his book.

There are many publications out now on the bilingual brain but the results are often opaque for the lay person. What are the latest notable findings in your field?

I think there are some interesting findings with regard to neuroanatomical differences and bilingualism. To me the notion that differences in language experience can lead to clear neuroanatomical differences is the most exciting finding to emerge in recent years.

You propose in your book that the bilingual's languages peacefully co-exist in the brain and share resources but they can also compete for these resources. Can you tell us more about this?

Let me give you two examples. I NEVER have problems differentiating between the words "effect" and "affect" but I have noticed that monolingual English speakers can confuse these two words. I attribute this to the fact that each of those words have Spanish cognates with very distinct pronunciations. In this way, Spanish helps my English. But the languages can also compete. Many years ago, a Spanish-speaking friend of mine told the waitress at a restaurant to be careful because he was vicious. The waitress was frightened. I had to remind my friend that “vicioso” means addict or having an addictive personality and that "vicious" means something else in English. Both words come from "vice" but they have a very different meaning in each language. This is the competing part.

According to you, stress may lead to the apparent loss of one language (in terms of it being forgotten), but not of the other. What can you tell us about this?

I don’t really make a strong link between memory and language in my writing but as I think more and more about this it becomes clear that one exists. Our memory is set up to remember what we need when we need it. In this sense, our languages are set up to be remembered when we need them. We could also think about language dominance within this perspective. If one language is more dominant it could be less susceptible to stress. It simply has stronger interconnections with our knowledge. So it takes a much bigger punch to knock it out. A less dominant language will have weaker interconnections and so take much less to show a loss.

Why are some languages privileged in the bilingual brain and not others?

I think two factors play a role. When you learn it and how well you speak it are the two main factors which are also known as age of acquisition and proficiency.

How do modern neural theories explain that a bilingual can speak just one language at one moment in time and speak two languages together in the form of "mixed speech" at another?

Language mixing is an interesting phenomenon. One metaphor is that there is a “language switch” that exists somewhere. Studies suggest that areas in the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe and/or the basal ganglia are involved. The problem is that individuals can engage in mixed speech with little apparent cost in some situations. To me the main issue has to do with external cues that might be serving to trigger each language. It reminds me a lot of your own monolingual and bilingual mode studies from many years ago. My guess is that the brain can readily adapt to these different cues and then load up the appropriate responses. This might require the prefrontal cortex which is involved in flexibility. But it could also be fairly automatic and hence rely on the basal ganglia as well.

It would appear that neuropsycholinguistics has moved away from where languages are stored in the brain (recall the hemispheric localization debates) to how they are processed? Is this due in part to recent development in imaging techniques?

I think the entire field of cognitive neuroscience has started to take a much more systems-oriented approach (i.e. how such things as the brain, the mind and other aspects of the human body interact). The days of thinking about one brain area as containing a representation are long gone.

You are a strong defender of merging the "older" mind sciences and the "newer" brain sciences. How can the two contribute on an equal footing to our understanding of language acquisition and language processing?

To me they are really the same thing. I think studying the brain has transformed how I think about language. Mind sciences are traditionally based on thinking about the mind as a computer. The information processing approach has yielded a rich data set. But the problem is that we are not computers. Liz Bates of the University of California at San Diego used to say that connectionist networks are not humans. They need to get a life. We are not just minds or brains operating in the world. Our brains are connected to the body and as such we function as an organism. I really believe that thinking about the mind as emerging from the brain and body makes more sense.

Where do you see the bilingual brain sciences going in the next few years?

I think the bilingual brain sciences need to come full circle and start to address the fundamental questions that were laid out in the late 19^thcentury and early 20^th century. How do age of acquisition, language proficiency and language control help to shape the bilingual brain. Rather than thinking about areas of the brain, we could start to think about cognition as a series of brain states that come and go like waves near the shore.

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http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201409/understanding-the-bilingual-brain

The Bilingual Mind

Temple University professor, Aneta Pavlenko, has just written a ground-breaking book, The Bilingual Mind, on the intriguing relationship between language and thought in bi- and multilinguals. She is herself a speaker of many languages and has researched this topic for much of her career. She has very kindly accepted to answer a few questions about her book.

Your work is inspired by the writings of some renowned linguists and anthropologists such as Humboldt, Boas, Sapir and Whorf. What role did they play exactly?

These scholars are commonly seen as proponents of linguistic relativity, the idea that different languages shape different worlds for their speakers. This idea is highly controversial and yet at the heart of the debate is a profound misunderstanding–and a deliberate misrepresentation–of Sapir’s and Whorf’s actual views. When we go back to their writings, we see that these multilingual scholars, interested in language change, did not believe for a moment that language determines thought. If it did, both language change and successful second language learning would have been impossible. In the book, I attempt to solve this linguistic whodunit, identify the real authors of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and then return to the original questions raised by Humboldt, Sapir, and Whorf about what happens when we learn a new language.

What do you mean by the expression "the bilingual mind"?

I use the expression ‘the bilingual mind’ to draw attention to the fact that most of the world’s population is bi- or multilingual and to argue that this bi-/multilingualism matters for our understanding of human cognition. The process of learning and using language affects categorization, memory, perception, and self-perception; learning another language may reshape these processes and reorganize the structure of the mind.

You mention "language effects" in your discussion of the bilingual mind. Could you explain what you mean?

This term refers to demands individual languages place on our cognitive processes in terms of categorical judgments and allocation of attention. Some require us to mark whether the action is accomplished or still in progress, and others require us to say whether we personally witnessed particular events. Learning a new language requires us to allocate our resources differently and acquire new categorical distinctions and ways of parsing events.

You state that when one acquires a second language, cognitive restructuring takes place. Can you explain what this is?

Cognitive restructuring refers to self-reorganization of linguistic categories that takes place when we learn a second language. Take, for instance, English/Russian word pairs cup/chashka and glass/stakan. Russian speakers learning English will begin by associating the English words ‘cup’ and ‘glass’ with the already existing representations of ‘chashka’ and ‘stakan’. But this can only take them so far, because in English we call paper, plastic, and styrofoam containers for coffee on the go ‘cups’ and in Russian they are ‘stakanchiki’ (little glasses). To use English appropriately, the learner has to restructure the pre-existing representations, in the case of ‘glass’, for instance, shifting attention from shape to material. And this is just one simple example of the myriad of cognitive adjustments in lexical and grammatical categories that take place when we acquire a second language.

What are the main factors that account for this restructuring?

Cognitive restructuring is a very new direction in research on bilingualism. As a consequence, we are only beginning to understand its process and the factors that affect it. In my own view, the key factor involves language use in communication, in meaningful contexts and in the presence of physical objects. The co-occurrence of form and meaning allows us to form new connections between words and their referents and to learn to pay attention to distinctions required by the second language.

How has your own multilingualism influenced your thinking on this topic?

First, my multilingualism provides me with experiential insights into what it means to live in two or more languages. Secondly, my working languages–French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and my native Russian–offer access to a large body of literature that I can read in the original, which is particularly important in the case of Bakhtin, Luria, and Vygotsky who had been badly mistranslated into English.

In your book, you refer to a large amount of scholarly work, from many different sources, but you also call upon biographies, literature including poetry, as well as personal testimonies. Can you say a bit more about this?

Certainly. I deeply believe that our scholarship is only meaningful insofar as it can speak to real people and address their everyday problems and dilemmas. This is why I try to make connections between studies conducted in the experimental lab and autobiographical writing and poetry, which, in my view–and that of Vygotsky and Sapir–offers unprecedented access to people’s inner worlds. The mixing also reflects my academic bilingualism. My training took place in two academic surroundings, Russian- and English-speaking, and while I write in English, I draw on the Russian academic tradition of interweaving research with fiction and poetry.

At one point in your book, you state that you are "irreverent bynature". How has this trait helped you in your work?

From the first day of graduate school, I never assumed that I should be buying into this or that theory and have continuously questioned the premises and foundations of our research enterprise. I suspect that this unruly behavior made me a pest and a nuisance to my professors, yet it also made me a better scholar because it led me to disrespect artificial boundaries between fields and paradigms. Conducting experimental research taught me healthy respect for the challenges of empirical science, while sociolinguistic theories offered me tools necessary for critical evaluation of the scientific enterprise. Irreverence also makes me a better writer, or at least it makes writing more fun.

You sometimes show concern about the work of some psychologists, applied linguists, anthropologists and even translators. Why is that?

In the case of psychology, my main concern is with the treatment of bilingual participants. Some researchers exclude bilinguals as ‘unusual’ or ‘messy’ subjects and others treat them as representative speakers of their first languages, brushing aside any potential effects of second language learning. In the case of linguistics and anthropology, my main concern is with the researchers’ own bilingualism. Despite being linguists, we hold ourselves to an abysmally low standard as language learners. My concerns are reinforced by the many errors I see in the treatments of Russian in translation and in scholarly literature that sometimes does not even get the basic facts right.

Where do you see research on the bilingual mind going in the next ten years?

I see three main directions for research in the next decade. The first and the most straightforward will apply existing approaches to the study of other language combinations and different types of bi- and multilinguals. The second will examine whether language influences on cognition are also subject to plasticity effects; in other words, is there a critical period for learning to attend to categorical distinctions and motion trajectories in a native-like way? The third direction is to go beyond the study of acquisition of English, French, or German by immigrants and foreign language learners and to consider ways in which speakers of major world languages–including researchers–acquire languages spoken by small groups of people.

More generally, if you had one wish that could come true regarding bi- and multilinguals, what would it be?

This is an interesting and unexpected question. I guess, I would want people who speak more than one language to experience less anxiety about their languages, fewer concerns about perceived limitations and deficiencies and more joy and pride. When I come to workshops and conferences in your homeland, Switzerland, I witness amazing presentations and exchanges taking place in German, French, and English. Yet I also see my multilingual colleagues and their students being concerned about the limitations of their English, deficiencies in their German, or the wrong accent in their French. To end with your words that became a motto for my whole research agenda, a bilingual is not a sum of two monolinguals but a unique speaker/hearer in his/her own right. So let’s take pride in our linguistic abilities and achievements.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201310/the-bilingual-mind

Johnson: Bringing up baby bilingual

HIS weekend Johnson enjoyed an American holiday in Berlin: the children's Halloween party held by neighbours, a half-German, half-American couple. Besides mermaid tails, ladybug antennas or monster horns, nearly every one of the nippers at the party had another accessory: a second language.

Johnson’s own nipper is still pre-verbal at nearly 18 months, meaning that every request not immediately understood and satisfied may quickly turn into a piercing shriek. But we take comfort that Johnson, junior, is cognitively just fine. If his language comes a little late, that is probably because, for one thing, he is male, and for another, he is surrounded every day by three languages: English and Danish at home, and German all day at nursery. More confusingly still, the three languages are closely related: is it bread, Brot or brød? Apple, Apfel or æble? House, Haus or hus? The earthy words in English are mostly Germanic, meaning these triplets are coming up in his world all the time.

Children raised bilingual or multilingual show similar results. In early days they will mix languages. They make errors by using the syntax of one language and the words of another. (“Touch the guitar”, my old Spanish teacher’s daughter would say, instead of “Play the guitar”.) But these problems disappear quickly. By three or four, children reliably separate the languages, knowing which can be spoken with whom. Their fluency in each would be the envy of any adult language-learner.

Many parents once believed that a second language was a bad idea, as it would interfere with developing the first and more important one. But such beliefs are woefully out of date today. Some studies (such as this one) seem to show that bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language (at early stages) than monolinguals do. But other studies (such as this one) find no vocabulary shortfall in either language. In any case, the influence of mono- or bilingualism on vocabulary size is later overtaken by the importance of education, socio-economic status, reading and writing habits. In short, there is little evidence that raising a child bilingual will hurt their primary language.

The benefits, by contrast, are both strong and long-lasting. Bilingual children as young as seven months outperform monolinguals at tasks requiring “executive function”: prioritising and planning complex tasks and switching mental gears. This is probably because monitoring the use of two languages is itself an exercise in executive function. Such studies control for socio-economic status, and in fact the same beneficial effects have been shownin bilingual children of poor families. Finally, the effects appear to be lifelong: bilinguals havelater onset of Alzheimer’s disease, on average, than do monolinguals.

All this is hot evidence for a mental exercise that could give children a lifelong advantage. Should you then run out and sign your child up for whatever language you can find? Alas, no. As the saying goes, “for whosoever hath, to him shall be given.” Multiple languages are best for you when you’ve had them from birth. The dramatic studies here work with “crib” bilinguals, children raised with both languages spoken by natives in their homes.

And even having a native speaker among the parents at home is not by itself enough. If a child is raised by one monoglot Anglophone and one bilingual in an English-speaking country, the child's second language may atrophy if the bilingual parent isn’t strict about conducting all exchanges with the child in this language. This is the root of the “one parent, one language” theory that many bilingual families swear by. By this theory, consistency is important for the learning brain. 

But one researcher on the topic, François Grosjean, disagrees that one-parent, one-language is a must. Instead, he says, “the need factor is crucial”—that is, the child must experience regular monolingual situations in each language. If there are no domains (school, travel, grandparents) where only one of the two languages will do, “children are very good at judging whether it is worth maintaining a language or letting it wither away.” One option he recommends is to speak only one language at home and the other outside the home. (This requires both parents to be fairly fluent in both languages, though.) 

For parents who cannot make their children “crib bilinguals”, there are, of course, still many reasons to teach children foreign languages, and many benefits. Here, still, time is not on parents’ and teachers’ sides. The earlier children begin the second language, the better they will learn it. Norway has already introduced English in the first year of school, and Denmark is soon to do so. These countries, unlike France, Germany or Spain, have very small languages of their own, so they know language ability is crucial to their future competitiveness. Talk about the “need factor”.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/10/multilingualism-0