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

Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and—the obvious—the ability to speak a second language. One purported advantage was not mentioned, though. Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

It’s an exciting notion, the idea that one’s very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim—as many people do—to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example,reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called “Whorfianism”, this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.

This influence is not necessarily linked to the vocabulary or grammar of a second language. Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of “crib” bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism. 

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work. 

So there are two very good reasons (asymmetrical ability, and priming) that make people feel different speaking their different languages. We are still left with a third kind of argument, though. An economist recently interviewed here at Prospero, Athanasia Chalari, said for example that:

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

Is there something intrinsic to the Greek language that encourages Greeks to interrupt? Consider Johnson sceptical. People seem to enjoy telling tales about their languages' inherent properties, and how they influence their speakers. A group of French intellectual worthies once proposed, rather self-flatteringly, that French be the sole legal language of the EU, because of its supposedly unmatchable rigour and precision. Some Germans believe that frequently putting the verb at the end of a sentence makes the language especially logical. But language myths are not always self-flattering: many speakers think their languages are unusually illogical or difficult—witness the plethora of books along the lines of "Only in English do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway; English must be the craziest language in the world!" What such pop-Whorfian stories share is a (natural) tendency to exoticise languages. We also see some unsurprising overlap with national stereotypes and self-stereotypes: French, rigorous; German, logical; English, playful. Of course.

In this case, Ms Chalari, a scholar, at least proposed a specific and plausible line of causation from grammar to personality: in Greek, the verb comes first, and it carries a lot of information, hence easy interrupting. The problem is that many unrelated  languages all around the world put the verb at the beginning of sentences. Many languages all around the world are heavily inflected, encoding lots of information in verbs. It would be a striking finding if all of these unrelated languages had speakers more prone to interrupting each other. Welsh, for example, is also both verb-first and about as heavily inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy conversationalists.

Neo-Whorfians continue to offer evidence and analysis that aims to prove that different languages push speakers to think differently. One such effort is forthcoming: “The Bilingual Mind” by Aneta Pavlenko, to be published in April. Ms Pavlenko speaks to François Grosjeanhere. Meanwhile, John McWhorter takes the opposite stance in "The Language Hoax", forthcoming in February. We'll return to this debate. But strong Whorfian arguments do not need to be valid for people to feel differently in their different languages. 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingualismfsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Fdifferentpersonalitieslanguage