Learning another language

The idea that bilingual children have superior executive function compared to monolingual children has been challenged in recent research. Executive function controls your attention, and helps with such tasks as remembering instructions, controlling responses, and shifting swiftly between tasks. It is positively correlated with children's academic achievement.

However, executive function is a complex construct, with several different components. It has been suggested that inconsistent research findings as to the advantage of bilingualism may be related to differences in how executive function is measured and conceptualized.

A new German study hopes to have dealt with this issues through its methodology and analysis.

The study compared 242 children (aged 5-15) who spoke both Turkish and German, and 95 children who spoke only German. The children’s executive function was tested using a computerized task called Hearts and Flowers, that required the child to press a different key in response to stimuli on the screen, depending on the condition. The congruent condition matched the key to the location of the heart stimulus; the incongruent condition required the child to press the key on the opposite side to where the flower stimulus appeared; the mixed condition tested the ability of the child to use the correct rule depending on which stimulus appeared.

The study found no significant differences in executive function between the two groups, after taking into account maternal education, child gender, age, and working memory (digit span backwards).

The researchers also took into account children's German and Turkish vocabulary size and exposure to both languages, factors for which previous studies on the topic had been criticized for lacking.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-01/uota-dbb011819.php

Paper available at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209981

 

Jaekel N, Jaekel J, Willard J, Leyendecker B (2019) No evidence for effects of Turkish immigrant children‘s bilingualism on executive functions. PLoS ONE 14(1): e0209981. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209981

 

It’s long been speculated that there’s a critical period for learning a new language, but the specifics are a matter of debate. It is difficult to follow a sufficient number of language learners through their years of learning. But a new study has got over that difficulty by using the ability of Facebook to get vast numbers of people, who represent many stages of learning.

The study involved a 10-minute quiz on English grammar, after which users were asked to reveal their current age and the age at which they began learning English, as well as other information about their language background. Complete data was received from 669,498 people (both native and non-native English speakers).

Testing a number of computational models to see which was most consistent with the results, the researchers concluded that grammar-learning ability remains strong until age 17 or 18, at which point it drops. This is a much longer period than previously thought.

However, the study also found that it is nearly impossible for people to achieve proficiency similar to that of a native speaker unless they start learning a language by the age of 10. There wasn’t much difference between those who started learning the language at birth and those who began at 10, but if you start learning after 10, you don’t have a long enough time before reaching 18, to achieve the proficiency of native speakers.

It’s not clear, however, that these differences necessarily have to do with physiology. It still may be social or cultural, given that people’s lives customarily change at that age. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of how much time and effort you are able to devote.

The quiz was designed to be entertaining enough to go viral (in which it succeeded!), and included questions that used grammatical rules most likely to trip up a non-native speaker, as well as questions designed to reveal which dialect of English the test-taker speaks (acceptable grammar can vary by dialect).

Do note that this is only about learning to the standard of a native speaker! It emphatically does not mean that you can’t learn a language as an adult!

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/miot-csd042718.php

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/bc-bwf043018.php

Musicians and people who are bilingual have long been shown to have a better working memory, and a new study makes a start on identifying why this might be so.

The brain imaging study, involving 41 young adults (aged 19-35), who were either monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, or bilingual non-musicians, found that musicians and bilinguals needed fewer brain resources when remembering sounds.

Participants were asked to identify whether the sound they heard was the same type as the previous one, and if the sound came from the same direction as the previous one. Sounds from musical instruments, the environment and humans were among those used in the study.

Musicians remembered the type of sound faster than individuals in the other groups, and bilinguals and musicians performed better than monolinguals on the location task. Although bilinguals remembered the sound at about the same level as monolingual non-musicians, their brains showed less activity when completing the task.

In both tasks and both levels of difficulty, musicians showed lower brain activity in the superior prefrontal frontal gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex bilaterally, which is thought to reflect better use of neural resources. Bilinguals showed increased activity in language-related areas (left DLPFC and left supramarginal gyrus), which may reflect a need to suppress interference associated with competing semantic activations from multiple languages.

The findings demonstrate that musical training and bilingualism benefit executive functioning and working memory via different activities and networks.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/bcfg-lmo051018.php

A small study using an artificial language adds to evidence that new vocabulary is learned more easily when the learner uses gestures.

“Vimmish”, the artificial language used in the study, follows similar phonetic rules to Italian. The German-speaking participants were given abstract and concrete nouns to learn over the course of a week. In the first experiment, the 21 subjects heard the words and their translations under one of three conditions:

  • with a video showing a symbolic gesture of the word's meaning, which they imitated
  • with a picture illustrating the word's meaning, which they traced in the air
  • with no gestures or pictures.

On the 8th day, the participants were tested while their brain activity was monitored. The test involved hearing the foreign word, then selecting the correct translation from four written options.

The researchers were interested in learning whether they could predict the learning condition from the brain activity patterns displayed when the participants were tested. They found that the gesture condition and control could be distinguished in two brain regions: a visual area that processes biological motion (part of the right superior temporal sulcus), and the left premotor cortex. Activity in these regions was also significantly correlated with performance. The picture condition and control could be distinguished in a visual area that processes objects (the right anterior lateral occipital cortex). There was a trend for this activity to correlate with performance, but it didn't reach significance.

Paper-and-pencil translation tests two and six months after learning showed that learning with gestures was significantly better than the other conditions. But note that there was no advantage for any condition in a free recall task.

A second experiment compared gesture and pictures in the more common picture scenario — participants only viewed the video or picture; there was no imitation. Unsurprisingly, there was no motor cortex involvement in this scenario: gesture and control conditions were distinguished only by activity in the biological motion part of the right superior temporal sulcus. The correlation of activity in the right anterior LOC with performance in the picture condition this time reached significance. But most importantly, this time the picture condition led to better translation accuracy than the other two conditions.

However, the most significant result is this: when both experiments were evaluated together, the gesture benefit in experiment 1 (when the participant copied the gesture) was greater than the picture benefit in the second experiment.

The findings are in keeping with other evidence that foreign words are learned more easily when multiple senses are involved.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/m-lwa020415.php

A small study that compared teaching Spanish-speaking children English vocabulary using a song or a spoken poem has found definite and long-term advantages to the song form.

The study involved 38 Spanish-speaking Ecuadorian children (aged 9-13), of whom 22 were randomly assigned to learn a 29-word English text as an oral poem, and 16 learned it as a song. None of the children had had any formal instruction in English; all had some limited music training. The children were given 4 training sessions and 3 testing sessions over two weeks, with a final test for 13 children six months later.

Children in the song condition out-performed those in the spoken condition on every measure: their ability to recall the passage verbatim, pronounce the words, and translate target terms from English to Spanish.

While pronunciation of vowels was notably better, though there was no difference in consonants.

Long-term recall is of course the main question of interest: six months after this little experiment, with no English instruction since, those from the song condition could recall without prompting an average of 8.83 words out of 10 target words, compared with 0.29 words for those from the spoken condition. However, there was no significant difference in translation success, which was extremely low in both cases (2.26 vs 1.07 — this compares with 4.03 vs 2.69 at the end of training).

The song itself, its melody and rhythmic structure, was remembered very well. The children in the song condition also enjoyed the learning sessions much more.

The study is small, and comes with several caveats, but it does provide support for the use of songs as an adjunct to foreign language learning.

[3969] Good, A. J., Russo F. A., & Sullivan J.
(2015).  The efficacy of singing in foreign-language learning.
Psychology of Music. 43(5), 627 - 640.

An Indian study involving 648 dementia patients, of whom 391 were bilingual, has found that, overall, bilingual patients developed dementia 4.5 years later than the monolingual ones. There was no additional advantage to speaking more than two languages.

The effect remained after factors such as education, sex, occupation, and urban vs. rural dwelling, had been accounted for. The finding is consistent with previous research, and is not only the largest study so far on the subject, but the first to show the effect also applies to illiterate people who had not attended school. Moreover, the effect was found in three different types of dementia: frontotemporal, vascular, and Alzheimer’s disease.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-11/uoe-sas110613.php

http://www.psmag.com/health/evidence-bilingualism-delays-onset-dementia-69595/

[3548] Alladi, S., Bak T. H., Duggirala V., Surampudi B., Shailaja M., Shukla A K., et al.
(2013).  Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status.
Neurology. 81(22), 1938 - 1944.

In my last report, I discussed a finding that intensive foreign language learning ‘grew’ the size of certain brain regions. This growth reflects gray matter increase. Another recent study looks at a different aspect: white matter.

In the study, monthly brain scans were taken of 27 college students, of whom 11 were taking an intensive nine-month Chinese language course. These brain scans were specifically aimed at tracking white matter changes in the students’ brains.

Significant changes were indeed observed in the brains of the language learners. To the researchers’ surprise, however, the biggest changes were observed in an area not previously considered part of the language network: the white matter tracts that cross the corpus callosum, the main bridge between the hemispheres. (I’m not quite sure why they were surprised, since a previous study had found that bilinguals showed higher white matter integrity in the corpus callosum.)

Significant changes were also observed within the left-hemisphere language network and in the right temporal lobe. The rate of increase in white matter was linear, showing a steady progression with each passing month.

The researchers suggest that plasticity in the adult brain may differ from that seen in children’s brains. While children’s brains change mainly through the pruning of unwanted connections and the death of unwanted cells, adult brains may rely mainly on neurogenesis and myelinogenesis.

The growth of new myelin is a process that is still largely mysterious, but it’s suggested that activity at the axons (the extensions of neurons that carry the electrical signals) might trigger increases in the size, density, or number of oligodendrocytes (the cells responsible for the myelin sheaths). This process is thought to be mediated by astrocytes, and in recent years we have begun to realize that astrocytes, long regarded as mere ‘support cells’, are in fact quite important for learning and memory. Just how important is something researchers are still working on.

The finding of changes between the frontal hemispheres and caudate nuclei is consistent with a previously-expressed idea that language learning requires the development of a network to control switching between languages.

Does the development of such a network enhance the task-switching facility in working memory? Previous research has found that bilinguals tend to have better executive control than monolinguals, and it has been suggested that the experience of managing two (or more) languages reorganizes certain brain networks, creating a more effective basis for executive control.

As in the previous study, the language studied was very different from the students’ native language, and they had no previous experience of it. The level of intensity was of course much less.

I do wonder if the fact that the language being studied was Mandarin Chinese limits the generality of these findings. Because of the pictorial nature of the written language, Chinese has been shown to involve a wider network of regions than European languages.

Nevertheless, the findings add to the evidence that adult brains retain the capacity to reorganize themselves, and add to growing evidence that we should be paying more attention to white matter changes.

[3143] Schlegel, A. A., Rudelson J. J., & Tse P. U.
(2012).  White Matter Structure Changes as Adults Learn a Second Language.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 24(8), 1664 - 1670.

Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Luk, G. (2012). Bilingualism: consequences for mind and brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(4), 240–250. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.03.001

Luk, G. et al. (2011) Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults. J. Neurosci. 31, 16808–16813

A small Swedish brain imaging study adds to the evidence for the cognitive benefits of learning a new language by investigating the brain changes in students undergoing a highly intensive language course.

The study involved an unusual group: conscripts in the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy. These young people, selected for their talent for languages, undergo an intensive course to allow them to learn a completely novel language (Egyptian Arabic, Russian or Dari) fluently within ten months. This requires them to acquire new vocabulary at a rate of 300-500 words every week.

Brain scans were taken of 14 right-handed volunteers from this group (6 women; 8 men), and 17 controls that were matched for age, years of education, intelligence, and emotional stability. The controls were medical and cognitive science students. The scans were taken before the start of the course/semester, and three months later.

The brain scans revealed that the language students showed significantly greater changes in several specific regions. These regions included three areas in the left hemisphere: the dorsal middle frontal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the superior temporal gyrus. These regions all grew significantly. There was also some, more selective and smaller, growth in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus in the right hemisphere. The hippocampus also grew significantly more for the interpreters compared to the controls, and this effect was greater in the right hippocampus.

Among the interpreters, language proficiency was related to increases in the right hippocampus and left superior temporal gyrus. Increases in the left middle frontal gyrus were related to teacher ratings of effort — those who put in the greatest effort (regardless of result) showed the greatest increase in this area.

In other words, both learning, and the effort put into learning, had different effects on brain development.

The main point, however, is that language learning in particular is having this effect. Bear in mind that the medical and cognitive science students are also presumably putting in similar levels of effort into their studies, and yet no such significant brain growth was observed.

Of course, there is no denying that the level of intensity with which the interpreters are acquiring a new language is extremely unusual, and it cannot be ruled out that it is this intensity, rather than the particular subject matter, that is crucial for this brain growth.

Neither can it be ruled out that the differences between the groups are rooted in the individuals selected for the interpreter group. The young people chosen for the intensive training at the interpreter academy were chosen on the basis of their talent for languages. Although brain scans showed no differences between the groups at baseline, we cannot rule out the possibility that such intensive training only benefited them because they possessed this potential for growth.

A final caveat is that the soldiers all underwent basic military training before beginning the course — three months of intense physical exercise. Physical exercise is, of course, usually very beneficial for the brain.

Nevertheless, we must give due weight to the fact that the brain scans of the two groups were comparable at baseline, and the changes discussed occurred specifically during this three-month learning period. Moreover, there is growing evidence that learning a new language is indeed ‘special’, if only because it involves such a complex network of processes and brain regions.

Given that people vary in their ‘talent’ for foreign language learning, and that learning a new language does tend to become harder as we get older, it is worth noting the link between growth of the hippocampus and superior temporal gyrus and language proficiency. The STG is involved in acoustic-phonetic processes, while the hippocampus is presumably vital for the encoding of new words into long-term memory.

Interestingly, previous research with children has suggested that the ability to learn new words is greatly affected by working memory span — specifically, by how much information they can hold in that part of working memory called phonological short-term memory. While this is less important for adults learning another language, it remains important for one particular category of new words: words that have no ready association to known words. Given the languages being studied by these Swedish interpreters, it seems likely that much if not all of their new vocabulary would fall into this category.

I wonder if the link with STG is more significant in this study, because the languages are so different from the students’ native language? I also wonder if, and to what extent, you might be able to improve your phonological short-term memory with this sort of intensive practice.

In this regard, it’s worth noting that a previous study found that language proficiency correlated with growth in the left inferior frontal gyrus in a group of English-speaking exchange students learning German in Switzerland. Is this difference because the training was less intensive? because the students had prior knowledge of German? because German and English are closely related in vocabulary? (I’m picking the last.)

The researchers point out that hippocampal plasticity might also be a critical factor in determining an individual’s facility for learning a new language. Such plasticity does, of course, tend to erode with age — but this can be largely counteracted if you keep your hippocampus limber (as it were).

All these are interesting speculations, but the main point is clear: the findings add to the growing evidence that bilingualism and foreign language learning have particular benefits for the brain, and for protecting against cognitive decline.

Here’s an intriguing study for those interested in how language affects how we think. It’s also of interest to those who speak more than one language or are interested in learning another language, because it deals with the long-debated question as to whether bilinguals working in their non-native language automatically access the native-language representations in long-term memory, or whether they can ‘switch off’ their native language and use only the target language memory codes.

The study follows on from an earlier study by the same researchers that indicated, through the demonstration of hidden priming effects, that bilinguals subconsciously access their first language when reading in their second language. In this new study, 45 university students (15 native English speakers, 15 native Chinese speakers, and 15 Chinese-English bilinguals) were shown two blocks of 90 word pairs. The pairs could have positive emotional value (e.g., honesty-program), negative valence (failure-poet), or neutral valence (aim-carpenter); could be semantically related (virus-bacteria; love-rose) or unrelated (weather-gender). The English or Chinese words were flashed on the screen one at a time, with a brief interval between the first and second word. The students had to indicate whether the second word was related in meaning to the first, and their brain activity was monitored.

The English and Chinese speakers acted as controls — it was the bilinguals, of course, who were the real interest. Some of the English word pairs shared a sound in the Chinese translation. If the Chinese words were automatically activated, therefore, the sound repetition would have a priming effect.

This is indeed what was found (confirming the earlier finding and supporting the idea that native language translations are automatically activated) — but here’s the interesting thing: the priming effect occurred only for positive and neutral words. It did not occur when the bilinguals saw negative words such as war, discomfort, inconvenience, and unfortunate.

The finding, which surprised the researchers, is nonetheless consistent with previous evidence that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker's native language. Parents, too, tend to speak to their infants in their native tongue. Emotion, it seems, is more strongly linked to our first language.

It’s traditionally thought that second language processing is fundamentally determined by the age of acquisition and the level of proficiency. The differences in emotional resonance have been, naturally enough, attributed to the native language being acquired first. This finding suggests the story is a little more complicated.

The researchers theorize that they have touched on the mechanism by which emotion controls our fundamental thought processes. They suggest that the brain is trying to protect us by minimizing the effect of distressing or disturbing emotional content, by shutting down the unconscious access to the native language (in which the negative words would be more strongly felt).

A few more technical details for those interested:

The Chinese controls demonstrated longer reaction times than the English controls, which suggests (given that 60% of the Chinese word pairs had overt sound repetitions but no semantic relatedness) that this conjunction made the task substantially more difficult. The bilinguals, however, had reaction times comparable to the English controls. The Chinese controls showed no effect of emotional valence, but did show priming effects of the overt sound manipulation that were equal for all emotion conditions.

The native Chinese speakers had recently arrived in Britain to attend an English course. Bilinguals had been exposed to English since the age of 12 and had lived in Britain for an average of 20.5 months.

[2969] Wu, Y J., & Thierry G.
(2012).  How Reading in a Second Language Protects Your Heart.
The Journal of Neuroscience. 32(19), 6485 - 6489.

I always like gesture studies. I think I’m probably right in saying that they started with language learning. Way back in 1980 it was shown that acting out action phrases meant they were remembered better than if the phrases had been only heard or read (the “enactment effect”). Enacted items, it turned out, “popped out” effortlessly in free recall tests — in other words, enactment had made the phrases highly accessible. Subsequent research found that this effect occurred both for both older and younger adults, and in immediate and delayed recall tests — suggesting not only that such items are more accessible but that forgetting is slower.

Following these demonstrations, there have been a few studies that have specifically looked at the effect of gestures on learning foreign languages, which have confirmed the benefits of gestures. But there are various confounding factors that are hard to remove when using natural languages, which is why the present researchers have developed an artificial language (“Vimmi”) to use in their research. In their first study, as in most other studies, the words and phrases used related to actions. In a new study, the findings were extended to more abstract vocabulary.

In this study, 20 German-speakers participated in a six-day language class to study Vimmi. The training material included 32 sentences, each containing a subject, verb, adverb, and object. While the subject nouns were concrete agents (e.g., musician, director), the other words were all abstract. Here’s a couple of sample sentences (translated, obviously): (The) designer frequently shapes (the) style. (The) pilot really enjoys (the) view. The length of the words was controlled: nouns all had 3 syllables; verbs and adverbs all had two.

For 16 of the sentences, participants saw the word in Vimmi and heard it. The translation of the word appeared on the screen fractionally later, while at the same time a video appeared in which woman performed the gesture relating to the word. The audio of the word was replayed, and participants were cued to imitate the gesture as they repeated the word. For the other 16 sentences, a video with a still image of the actress appeared, and the participants were simply cued to repeat the word when the audio was replayed.

While many of the words used gestures similar to their meaning (such as a cutting gesture for the word “cut”), the researchers found that the use of any gesture made a difference as long as it was unique and connected to a specific word. For example, the abstract word “rather” does not have an obvious gesture that would go with it. However, a gesture attached to this word also worked.

Each daily session lasted three hours. From day 2, sessions began with a free recall and a cued recall test. In the free recall test, participants were asked to write as many items as possible in both German and Vimmi. Items had to be perfectly correct to be counted. From day 4, participants were also required to produce new sentences with the words they had learned.

Right from the beginning, free recall of items which had been enacted was superior to those which hadn’t been — in German. However, in Vimmi, significant benefits from enactment occurred only from day 3. The main problem here was not forgetting the items, but correctly spelling them. In the cued recall test (translating from Vimmi to German, or German to Vimmi), again, the superiority of the enactment condition only showed up from day 3.

Perhaps the most interesting result came from the written production test. Here, people reproduced the same number of sentences they had learned on each of the three days of the test, and although enacted words were remembered at a higher rate, that rate didn’t alter, and didn’t reach significance. However, the production of new sentences improved each day, and the benefits of enactment increased each day. These benefits were significant from day 5.

The main question, however, was whether the benefits of enactment depended on word category. As expected, concrete nouns were remembered than verbs, followed by abstract nouns, and finally adverbs. When all the tests were lumped together, there was a significant benefit of enactment for all types of word. However, the situation became a little more nuanced when the data was separately analyzed.

In free recall, for Vimmi, enactment was only of significant benefit for concrete nouns and verbs. In cued recall, for translating German into Vimmi, the enactment benefit was significant for all except concrete nouns (I’m guessing concrete nouns have enough ‘natural’ power not to need gestures in this situation). For translating Vimmi into German, the benefit was only significant for verbs and abstract nouns. In new sentence production, interestingly, participants used significantly more items of all four categories if they had been enacted. This is perhaps the best evidence that enactment makes items more accessible in memory.

What all this suggests is that acting out new words helps you learn them, but some types of words may benefit more from this strategy than others. But I think we need more research before being sure about such subtleties. The pattern of results make it clear that we really need longer training, and longer delays, to get a better picture of the most effective way to use this strategy.

For example, it may be that adverbs, although they showed the most inconsistent benefits, are potentially the category that stands to gain the most from this strategy — because they are the hardest type of word to remember. Because any embodiment of such an abstract adverb must be arbitrary — symbolic rather than representational — it naturally is going to be harder to learn (yes, some adverbs could be represented, but the ones used in this study, and the ones I am talking about, are of the “rather”, “really”, “otherwise” ilk). But if you persist in learning the association between concept and gesture, you may derive greater benefit from enactment than you would from easier words, which need less help.

Here’s a practical discussion of all this from a language teacher’s perspective.

[2688] Macedonia, M., & Knösche T. R.
(2011).  Body in Mind: How Gestures Empower Foreign Language Learning.
Mind, Brain, and Education. 5(4), 196 - 211.

Growing evidence points to greater education and mentally stimulating occupations and activities providing a cognitive reserve that enables people with developing Alzheimer's to function normally for longer. Cognitive reserve means that your brain can take more damage before it has noticeable effects. A 2006 review found that some 30% of older adults found to have Alzheimer’s when autopsied had shown no signs of it when alive.

There are two relevant concepts behind the protection some brains have: cognitive reserve (which I have mentioned on a number of occasions), and brain reserve, which is more structural. ‘Brain reserve’ encapsulates the idea that certain characteristics, such as a greater brain size, help protect the brain from damage. Longitudinal studies have provided evidence, for example, that a larger head size in childhood helps reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

While cognitive reserve has been most often associated with education, it has also been associated with occupation, bilingualism, and music. A new study provides physical evidence for how effective bilingualism is.

The Toronto study involved 40 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s, of whom half were bilingual (fluent in a second language, and consistent users of both languages throughout their lives). Bilingual and monolingual patients were matched on a test of cognitive function (the Behavioral Neurology Assessment). The two groups were similar in education levels, gender, and performance on the MMSE and the clock drawing test. The groups did differ significantly in occupational status, with the monolinguals having higher job status than the bilinguals.

Notwithstanding this similarity in cognitive performance, brain scans revealed that the bilingual group had substantially greater atrophy in the medial temporal lobe and the temporal lobe. The two groups did not differ in measures of central and frontal atrophy, however — these regions are not associated with Alzheimer’s.

In other words, bilingualism seems to specifically help protect those areas implicated in Alzheimers, and the bilinguals could take much greater damage to the brain before it impacted their cognitive performance. It is suggested that the act of constantly switching between languages, or suppressing one language in favor of other, may help train the brain to be more flexible when the need comes to compensate for damaged areas.

The findings are consistent with previous observational studies suggesting that bilingualism delays the onset of Alzheimer's symptoms by up to five years.

[2712] Schweizer, T. A., Ware J., Fischer C. E., Craik F. I. M., & Bialystok E.
(2011).  Bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve: Evidence from brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease.
Cortex.

Valenzuela MJ and Sachdev P. 2006. Brain reserve and dementia: A systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 36(4): 441e454.

Bilingual parents of children with autism spectrum disorder often decide to speak only one language around their child because of advice from child development professionals who believe that exposure to two languages might further limit the child’s communication skills. Two recent studies challenge that assumption.

One study tested the vocabulary size of 14 bilingual (English-Mandarin/Cantonese) and 14 English-monolingual young children with ASD (aged 3-6). Bilingual children had a larger total vocabulary than monolingual children. When translation equivalents (two words in each language with the same meaning) were counted only once, the vocabularies of both bilingual and monolingual children were not significantly different. Both groups had equivalent scores on all but one measure of language and vocabulary, including English production vocabulary, conceptual production vocabulary, and vocabulary comprehension.

The second Canadian study found similar results in a slightly larger group of children (45 bilingual and 30 monolingual children with an average age of around 5). Languages covered were diverse: French, English, Chinese, Farsi, Hebrew, Italian, Romanian, Spanish and Tamil. Bilingual children were divided into those who were exposed to both languages from infancy, and those who were exposed later (the cut-off was 12 months, but in general changes in the language environment occurred much later: on average, children in the former group were bilingually-exposed for the first 25 months; children in the latter group were monolingually-exposed for the first 31 months). Eleven children were trilingual. In order not to introduce sampler bias, non-verbal children were not excluded — seven participants spoke fewer than 10 words, of whom two were nonverbal.

There were no significant differences between the three groups at a language level, although monolingual and bilingual children exposed from infancy consistently scored higher than bilingual children exposed from a later age. Also, children exposed to two or more languages from infancy scored significantly higher than both groups on social interaction, and those exposed later were worst of the three groups. These differences probably reflect various social variables underlying the different language experiences.

The main reason for the belief that autistic children are better not ‘burdened’ with an additional language is because of their language difficulties. These studies are not saying that a child with ASD raised in two languages will be equally fluent with both. In the second study, second language vocabularies were much smaller than their dominant language vocabularies. But that’s not the point. Whether or not there is any general cognitive advantage in bilingualism for this group, as there is for normally-developing children, remains to be determined. But there is a clear message that parents of ASD children can take on board: if your family is bilingual, relax and enjoy interacting with your ASD child in your language of choice.

An increasing number of studies have been showing the benefits of bilingualism, both for children and in old age. However, there’s debate over whether the apparent benefits for children are real, or a product of cultural (“Asians work harder!” or more seriously, are taught more behavioral control from an early age) or environmental factors (such as socioeconomic status).

A new study aimed to disentangle these complicating factors, by choosing 56 4-year-olds with college-educated parents, from middle-class neighborhoods, and comparing English-speaking U.S. children, Korean-speaking children in the U.S. and in Korea, and Korean-English bilingual children in the U.S.

The children were tested on a computer-game-like activity designed to assess the alerting, orienting, and executive control components of executive attention (a child version of the Attention Network Test). They were also given a vocabulary test (the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III) in their own language, if monolingual, or in English for the bilinguals.

As expected, given their young age, English monolinguals scored well above bilinguals (learning more than one language slows the acquisition of vocabulary in the short-term). Interestingly, however, while Korean monolinguals in Korea performed at a comparable level to the English monolinguals, Korean monolinguals in the U.S. performed at the level of the bilinguals. In other words, the monolinguals living in a country where their language is a majority language have comparable language skills, and those living in a country in which their primary language is a minority language have similar, and worse, language skills.

That’s interesting, but the primary purpose of the study was to look at executive control. And here the bilingual children shone over the monolinguals. Specifically, the bilingual children were significantly more accurate on the attention test than the monolingual Koreans in the U.S. (whether they spoke Korean or English). Although their performance in terms of accuracy was not significantly different from that of the monolingual children in Korea, these children obtained their high accuracy at the expense of speed. The bilinguals were both accurate and fast, suggesting a different mechanism is at work.

The findings confirm earlier research indicating that bilingualism, independent of culture, helps develop executive attention, and points to how early this advantage begins.

The Korean-only and bilingual children from the United States had first generation native Korean parents. The bilingual children had about 11 months of formal exposure to English through a bilingual daycare program, resulting in them spending roughly 45% of their time using Korean (at home and in the community) and 55% of their time using English (at daycare). The children in Korea belonged to a daycare center that did offer a weekly 15-minute session during which they were exposed to English through educational DVDs, but their understanding of English was minimal. Similarly, the Korean-only children in the U.S. would have had some exposure to English, but it was insufficient to allow them to understand English instructions. The researchers’ informal observation of the Korean daycare center and the ones in the U.S. was that the programs were quite similar, and neither was more enriching.

[2351] Yang, S., Yang H., & Lust B.
(2011).  Early Childhood Bilingualism Leads to Advances in Executive Attention: Dissociating Culture and Language.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 14(03), 412 - 422.

Clinical records of 211 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease have revealed that those who have spoken two or more languages consistently over many years experienced a delay in the onset of their symptoms by as much as five years. It’s thought that lifelong bilingualism may contribute to cognitive reserve in the brain, enabling it to compensate for memory loss, confusion, and difficulties with problem-solving and planning.

Of the 211 patients of the Sam and Ida Ross Memory Clinic at Baycrest, 102 patients were classified as bilingual and 109 as monolingual. Bilingual patients had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's 4.3 years later than the monolingual patients on average, and had reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later. The groups were equivalent on measures of cognitive and occupational level, there was no apparent effect of immigration status, and there were no gender differences.

The findings confirm an earlier study from the same researchers, from the clinical records of 184 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

[2039] Craik, F. I. M., Bialystok E., & Freedman M.
(2010).  Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease.
Neurology. 75(19), 1726 - 1729.

While most foreign language courses try hard to provide native speakers, a new study shows that adults find it easier when the teacher speaks it in the same accent as the student. 60 participants aged 18-26, of whom 20 were native Hebrew speakers, 20 new adult immigrants to Israel from the Former Soviet Union, and 20 were Israeli Arabic speakers who began learning Hebrew at age 7-8, has found that while accent made no difference to native Hebrew speakers, both the Russian and Arabic speakers needed less phonological information to recognize Hebrew words when they were pronounced in the accent of their native language.

[167] Leikin, M., Ibrahim R., Eviatar Z., & Sapir S.
(2009).  Listening with an Accent: Speech Perception in a Second Language by Late Bilinguals.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 38(5), 447 - 457.

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

Literate Arabic speakers have bilingual brains

Research has found that Arabic-speaking students tend to be less proficient in reading than other students are in their native language. Spoken Arabic comes in a variety of dialects and is quite different from the common written Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic - MSA). A new imaging study has now compared brain activity in a priming task among trilinguals fluent in MSA, spoken Arabic and Hebrew. The results revealed that the cognitive process in using MSA was more similar to that employed for Hebrew, and less similar to the cognitive process of using the spoken native language. These results not only help explain why learning to read is more difficult for Arabic speakers, but also suggests that the most effective way of teaching written Arabic is by using techniques usually employed for the instruction of a second language — including exposing children to written Arabic in preschool or kindergarten.

Ibrahim, R. 2009. The cognitive basis of diglossia in Arabic: Evidence from a repetition priming study within and between languages. Journal of Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 2.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/uoh-wiu110409.php

Relearning a forgotten language is easier for those under 40

A small study involving 7 native English speakers who had learned either Hindi or Zulu as children when living abroad, but now had no memory of the neglected language, found that the three who were under 40 could relearn certain phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to recognize, but those over 40, like those who had never been exposed to the language in childhood, could not. The amount of experience of exposure in childhood ranged from 4 to 10 years, and it’s especially notable that the 47-year old individual who had 10 years exposure, having become almost fluent, still could not recover the ability to distinguish these difficult sounds. It should also be noted that where the ability was recovered (and recovered almost to native ability), it took about 15-20 training sessions. The findings point to the value of early foreign language learning.

[975] Bowers, J. S., Mattys S. L., & Gage S. H.
(2009).  Preserved implicit knowledge of a forgotten childhood language.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 20(9), 1064 - 1069.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/afps-uio092409.php

Exposure to two languages carries far-reaching benefits

A new study provides evidence that bilingual speakers find it easier to learn a new language than those who only know one language. The study compared the ability of three groups of native English speakers - English-Mandarin bilinguals, English-Spanish bilinguals and monolinguals - to master words in an invented language that bore no relationship to English, Spanish or Mandarin. The bilingual participants mastered nearly twice the number of words as the monolinguals. The finding adds more support to the value of introducing another language to children at a young age.

[235] Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian V.
(2009).  The bilingual advantage in novel word learning.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 16(4), 705 - 710.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/nu-ett051909.php

Bilingual babies get a head start on executive functioning

A number of studies have pointed to benefits of being bilingual, but many people still believe that the experience of two languages in infancy may cause confusion and impair their acquisition of language. Now a new study shows that bilingual babies quickly adapt to different learning cues at seven months old compared with babies from single-language households. The study involved families in the Trieste area of Italy, where parents spoke to infants from birth using both Italian and Slovenian mother tongues. When bilingual and monolingual babies were first taught to look at one side of a screen in response to a sound cue (and in anticipation of a visual "reward" image of a puppet), then required to switch sides, it was found that bilingual babies quickly learned to look at the other side, but the monolingual babies never adapted to the change. The findings indicate that bilingualism gives an advantage above the purely linguistic, in executive function, which is consistent with other research indicating bilingual children have improved attention.

[1110] Kovacs, A. M., & Mehler J.
(2009).  Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106(16), 6556 - 6560.

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090413-bilingual-smart.html

Anatomical advantage for second language learners

Based on the size of a small brain region called Heschl's Gyrus (HG) in the left hemisphere, researchers found they could predict who would be more successful in learning 18 words in an invented language (those predicted to be "more successful learners" achieved an average of 97% accuracy in identifying the pseudo words, compared to 63% from those deemed "less successful"). The size of the right HG was not important. The finding was surprising, given that this area, the primary region of the auditory cortex, is typically associated with handling the basic building blocks of sound — whether the pitch of a sound is going up or down, where sounds come from, and how loud a sound is — rather than speech per se.

[1147] Wong, P. C. M., Warrier C. M., Penhune V. B., Roy A. K., Sadehh A., Parrish T. B., et al.
(2008).  Volume of Left Heschl's Gyrus and Linguistic Pitch Learning.
Cereb. Cortex. 18(4), 828 - 836.

http://www.physorg.com/news104599345.html

Early music training 'tunes' auditory system

Mandarin is a tonal language, that is, the pitch pattern is as important as the sound of the syllables in determining the meaning of a word. In a small study, a Mandarin word was presented to 20 adults as they watched a movie. All were native English speakers with no knowledge of Mandarin, but half had at least six years of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12, while half had minimal or no musical training. As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers measured the accuracy of their brainstem ability to track three differently pitched "mi" sounds. Those who were musically trained were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians. The study is the first to provide concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds, and supports the view that experience with music at a young age can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. The findings are in line with previous studies suggesting that musical experience can improve one's ability to learn tone languages in adulthood, and are also consistent with studies revealing anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some children with learning disabilities which can be improved by auditory training. The findings are also noteworthy for implicating the brainstem in processing that has been thought of as exclusively involving the cortex.

[667] Wong, P. C. M., Skoe E., Russo N. M., Dees T., & Kraus N.
(2007).  Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns.
Nat Neurosci. 10(4), 420 - 422.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-03/nu-rfm031207.php

Why learning a new language may make you forget your old one

The common experience of having difficulty remembering words in your native language when you’ve been immersed in a new language is called first-language attrition, and new research has revealed that it occurs because native language words that might distract us when we are mastering a new language are actively inhibited. The study also found that this inhibition lessened as students became more fluent with the new language, suggesting it principally occurs during the initial stages of second language learning.

[659] Levy, B. J., McVeigh N. D., Marful A., & Anderson M. C.
(2007).  Inhibiting your native language: the role of retrieval-induced forgetting during second-language acquisition.
Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. 18(1), 29 - 34.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070118094015.htm

Bilingualism has protective effect in delaying onset of dementia

An analysis of 184 people with dementia (132 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; the remaining 52 with other dementias) found that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the 91 monolingual patients was 71.4 years, while for the 93 bilingual patients it was 75.5 years — a very significant difference. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results.

[1271] Bialystok, E., Craik F. I. M., & Freedman M.
(2007).  Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia.
Neuropsychologia. 45(2), 459 - 464.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/bcfg-css011107.php

How bilingualism affects the brain

Using a new technique, researchers have shed light on how bilingualism affects the brain. The study involved 20 younger adults of whom half were bilingual in Spanish and English. Similar brain activity, in the left Broca's area and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), was found in bilinguals and monolinguals when the task involved only one language. However, when the bilinguals were simultaneously processing each of their two languages and rapidly switching between them, they showed an increase in brain activity in both the left and the right hemisphere Broca's area, with greater activation in the right equivalent of Broca's area and the right DLPFC. The findings support the view that the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals are similar, and both process their individual languages in fundamentally similar ways, but bilinguals engage more of the neurons available for language processing.

The study was presented at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting on October 14-18 in Atlanta, Ga.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/dc-drf101706.php

How does the bilingual brain distinguish between languages?

Studies of bilingual people have found that the same brain regions, particularly parts of the left temporal cortex, are similarly activated by both languages. But there must be some part of the brain that knows one language from another. A new imaging study reveals that this region is the left caudate — a finding supported by case studies of bilingual patients with damage to the left caudate, who are prone to switch languages involuntarily.

[405] Stockton, K., Usui K., Green D. W., Price C. J., Crinion J., Turner R., et al.
(2006).  Language Control in the Bilingual Brain.
Science. 312(5779), 1537 - 1540.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/608/2?etoc

Fast language learners have more white matter in auditory region

An imaging study has found that fast language learners have more white matter in a region of the brain that’s critical for processing sound. The study involved 65 French adults in their twenties, who were asked to distinguish two closely related sounds (the French 'da' sound from the Hindi 'da' sound). There was considerable variation in people’s ability to learn to tell these sounds apart — the fastest could do it within 8 minutes; the slowest were still guessing randomly after 20 minutes. The 11 fastest and 10 slowest learners were then given brain scans, revealing that the fastest learners had, on average, 70% more white matter in the left Heschl's gyrus than the slowest learners, as well as a greater asymmetry in the parietal lobe (the left being bigger than the right).

[569] Golestani, N., Molko N., Dehaene S., LeBihan D., & Pallier C.
(2007).  Brain Structure Predicts the Learning of Foreign Speech Sounds.
Cereb. Cortex. 17(3), 575 - 582.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8964

Language learning declines after second year of life

A study involving 96 deaf children who had received cochlear implants during their first four years of life has found that the rate of language learning was greatest for those given implants before they turned two. Children given implants at three or four years of age acquired language skills more slowly. The finding supports the idea that there is a 'sensitive period' for language learning, and suggests that deaf children should get cochlear implants sooner (it is still relatively rare for them to be given to children younger than two).

The findings were presented on 16 May at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Vancouver, Canada.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050516/full/050516-1.html

Learning languages increases gray matter density

An imaging study of 25 Britons who did not speak a second language, 25 people who had learned another European language before the age of five and 33 bilinguals who had learned a second language between 10 and 15 years old found that the density of the gray matter in the left inferior parietal cortex of the brain was greater in bilinguals than in those without a second language. The effect was particularly noticeable in the "early" bilinguals. The findings were replicated in a study of 22 native Italian speakers who had learned English as a second language between the ages of two and 34.

Mechelli, A., Crinion, J.T., Noppeney, U., O'doherty, J., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R.S. & Price, C.J. 2004. Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, 431, 757.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3739690.stm

Being fluent in two languages may help keep the brain sharper for longer

A study of 104 people aged between 30 and 88 has found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally. Those fluent in two languages responded faster on tasks assumed to place demands on working memory, compared to those who were fluent in just English, at all age groups. This is consistent with the theory that constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions. Bilingual volunteers were also much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age. The finding is consistent with other research suggesting that mental activity helps in protecting older adults from mental decline. The participants were all middle class, and educated to degree level. Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and were fluent in both English and Tamil.

[268] Bialystok, E., Craik F. I. M., Klein R., & Viswanathan M.
(2004).  Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task.
Psychology and Aging. 19(2), 290 - 303.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3794479.stm

Learning a second language may not be as laborious as believed

A study of adult learners of a second language has revealed that their brains still possess a surprising facility for learning words — much greater than the learner is consciously aware of. College students learning first-year French demonstrated brain activity that was clearly discriminating between real and pseudo-French words after only 14 hours of classroom instruction, although the students performed only at chance levels when asked to consciously choose whether or not the stimuli were real French words. The greater the exposure to French, the larger the difference in brain response to words and pseudo words.

[428] McLaughlin, J., Osterhout L., & Kim A.
(2004).  Neural correlates of second-language word learning: minimal instruction produces rapid change.
Nature Neuroscience. 7(7), 703 - 704.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/uow-baw061104.php

Beneficial effects of bilingual learning

A recent Canadian study comparing young monolingual children to bilingual found that bilingual children were much better at a non-language cognitive task. The 4-6 year old bilingual children were versed in a spoken language and a signing one. It was suggested that their higher cognitive skill was due to the increased computational demands of processing two different language systems.

Baker, S.A., Kovelman, I., Bialystok, E. & Petitto, L. A. (2003, November). “Bilingual children’s complex linguistic experience yields a cognitive advantage.” Presented at 2003 Society For Neuroscience conference. New Orleans, LA.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-11/sfn-ssb111103.php

Both languages active in bilingual speakers

An imaging study involving bilingual Dutch and English speakers suggests that when a bilingual person is speaking a second language, the first language is always active and cannot be suppressed. It was thought that an environment of total immersion in a language would provide massive exposure to a second language and suppress the first language. However, it’s now suggested that a large component of language immersion involves learning a new set of cues to the second language. To test this, students with no exposure to German or Dutch were taught 40 Dutch words. Some students learned the words in association with their English counterparts and others learned the words in association with a picture. Some of the pictures were oriented in the normal way and others were upside down or otherwise skewed. People who learned the Dutch in association with an object that was oriented uniquely were faster to later translate English words into Dutch. The mis-oriented pictures served as a unique cue.

The research was presented at the Second Language Research Forum, October 18, in Tucson, Arizona.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/ps-bla101703.php

Second language best taught in childhood

Sadly, it does appear that the easiest time to learn a second language is, indeed, in childhood. An imaging study has found that when grammatical judgement in the second language was compared to grammatical judgement in first language (as evidenced by performance on sentences with grammatical mistakes), there was no difference in brain activation in those who learned the second language as children. However, people who acquired the second language late and with different proficiency levels displayed significantly more activity in the Broca's region during second language grammatical processing. "This finding suggests that at the level of brain activity, the parallel learning of the two languages since birth or the early acquisition of a second language are crucial in the setting of the neural substrate for grammar."

[232] Wartenburger, I., Heekeren H. R., Abutalebi J., Cappa S. F., Villringer A., & Perani D.
(2003).  Early Setting of Grammatical Processing in the Bilingual Brain.
Neuron. 37(1), 159 - 170.

Study finds there's a critical time for learning all languages, including sign language

It is generally believed that there is a critical period for learning a first language, and that children not exposed to language during this period will never fully acquire language. It is also thought that this might apply as well to second language learning — that those who learn another language after puberty can never become as fluent as those who learn it before puberty. A recent study suggests that this may also be true for non-verbal languages. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was found that patterns of brain activity in bilingual people who learned American Sign Language (ASL) before puberty differed from those who learned it after puberty.

[1431] Newman, A. J., Bavelier D., Corina D., Jezzard P., & Neville H. J.
(2002).  A critical period for right hemisphere recruitment in American Sign Language processing.
Nat Neurosci. 5(1), 76 - 80.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-01/uow-sft010202.php

Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.