I have written a bit about the growing interest in ‘mental gymnastics’ and the idea that we can exercise out minds to greater power and efficiency. There are some simple exercises we can all do to develop out short term memories, there are plenty of exercises with which we can develop more astute problems solving and pattern recognition (just play Sudoku, chess, or even Mah Jonng). But there is still an area where we can develop some unique advantages…by learning another language.
Understanding The Way Languages Are Linked In the Brain
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/228547.php
Over half the world’s population speaks more than one language. But it’s not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it.
Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the new paper with her colleagues, Walter J.B. van Heuven and Kathy Conklin. She wanted to study how two different languages are stored in the bilingual brain. "If you read in English, you don’t really require your knowledge of Chinese. Do you switch it off?" Earlier research in European languages found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and French or Spanish and Italian, have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary. That’s not true for English and Chinese.
The subjects in Zhang’s experiments were all Chinese students at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. For the study, each person was shown pairs of words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly that the person didn’t realize they’d seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real word as quickly as possible. This was just a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.
The trick was this: Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection – but only if you know how they’re written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be "thing," which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be "west," which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for "west" appears in the word "thing," but these two words are totally unrelated in English.
Zhang found that, when two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster – even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.
"As long as I can speak English to you, why would you care what my brain is doing in terms of Chinese?" Zhang asks. In daily life, it doesn’t matter; it’s just good enough that she can talk to the people around her. But she says understanding the way languages are linked in the brain could someday help people learn second languages. "When people learn two languages, they automatically make the link between them. We would like to find out how the link between the two languages influences language processing."
Bilingual brains are healthier
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/12/ellen-bialystok-bilingual-brains-more-healthy
Ellen Bialystok is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research has shown that speaking two or more languages on a regular basis from a young age can have a positive effect on the brain. Not only does it enhance cognitive abilities, being bilingual can also delay symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Bialystok, 62, is a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Last year, she was awarded a $100,000 Killam prize for her contributions to the social sciences.
What was the first indication in your research that bilingualism had neurological benefits?
It came from children’s ability to understand the structure of language as well as the meaning. This is called metalinguistic knowledge, and it’s the key to using language for learning, for literacy, for thinking, for logic. To assess how far along they are in metalinguistic development, we would ask children between the ages of five and nine to judge whether or not a sentence is grammatically correct, however nonsensical it may be. The example I use is: "Apples grow on noses." It’s very hard for kids to say that’s OK grammatically: they want to tell you that apples don’t grow on noses. We found that bilingual children were better able to do this.
Why?
It relates to the essential problem of bilingualism. When a bilingual person is speaking in one language, research shows that the other language is active in his or her mind. That creates a problem: how do you select from the language you need without this other active language getting in the way? In my view, you incorporate a cognitive system called the executive control system, whose job it is to resolve competition and focus attention. If you’re bilingual, you are using this system all the time, and that enhances and fortifies it. And that’s why bilingual children can say that "Apples grow on noses" is said the right way: they are accustomed to resolving the conflict between form and meaning
Metalinguistic superiority aside, what other advantages are there?
The cognitive enhancement across the life span of a bilingual person is quite dramatic. It turns out that something as ordinary as speaking a couple of languages reconfigures the brain network in a way that positively affects certain things that brains do.
Can you give an example?
We did a study at the Baycrest geriatric centre in Toronto in which we identified 200 clear cases of Alzheimer’s disease and looked at the patients’ backgrounds to see if they were mono- or bilingual. Then we looked at how old they were when the family noticed something was wrong and when they were formally diagnosed. In both cases the bilinguals were significantly older, by about four years. We repeated that study using another 200 patients and got identical results.
