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The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

scientificamerican.com

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Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#41

Post by jcl »

Don't assume the behavior demonstrated in the article is an advantage... The study compares words, not people -- particularly, it does not measure the speed of monolingual readers at all.

The article headline is jumping to a conclusion that its body does not support. In fact, the body text is very careful not to claim any sort of advantage; the current headline is not the original one, and seems to have been chosen by someone not quite as careful as the article's author. The subheadline, "Bilingual people process certain words faster than others", is also wonderfully ambiguous.

It is entirely possible that multilingual readers generally read slower, or that there exists a class of "anti-cognate" words that trip up multilingual readers as much as cognates help them.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#42

Post by yannis »

joubert wrote: post #26
yannis wrote: post #11

My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans co…

Afrikaans is not a "sort of a Dutch dialect". It is a separate language, derived from Dutch (note, there are difference Afrikaans dialects). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans Interesting write-up of what is considered a "dialect", and how it differs from "language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

From a certain perspective no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. My mother language is Greek but I speak the Cypriot dialect. Mainland Greeks have great difficulty understanding Cypriots talking but not the other way round. This is very true of Afrikaans too. It is easier for an Afrikaner to understand Dutch but not the other way round. But you probably right I should have called it a language.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#43

Post by pbhjpbhj »

timwiseman wrote: post #22
nfnaaron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not much of a perceived advantage to study a 2nd language as an American, because no matter where you go there's probably someone who speaks English, and chances are that wherever you go few if any speak the 2nd language that you studied as a kid. There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language. There's large payoff for people from non-English speaking countries to study English; it must be true or…

I think learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory, but there is no language other than English that is so widespread to make that particular langauage dominant. I think that within the limits of the resources, schools should try to offer a few choices and let the students choose. Sometimes a language will appeal to a student because something they are interested in is hea…

>learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory

Would you include in this those who can't use a first language to any reasonable degree. Or those who already have the main language of the country (English say) as their second language? I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation and ability of the students.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#44

Post by yannis »

kowen wrote: post #21
yannis wrote: post #11

My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans co…

Interesting! Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'. When I speak in Norwegian I toss in…

If you want to raise your kids bilingually one way is for you to only speak to them say in Norwegian and your wife to speak to them only in English. It is a very interesting subject especially fro an evolutionary point of view - what's happening to you when you speak to your friends is normal it happens to all my friends an myself. You can imagine if your friends and you and your families were isolated say in Island for 200 years your descendants would have been speaking a new language composed of Norwegian, French and English.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#45

Post by joubert »

yannis wrote: post #42
joubert wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afrikaans is not a "sort of a Dutch dialect". It is a separate language, derived from Dutch (note, there are difference Afrikaans dialects). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans Interesting write-up of what is considered a "dialect", and how it differs from "language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

From a certain perspective no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. My mother language is Greek but I speak the Cypriot dialect. Mainland Greeks have great difficulty understanding Cypriots talking but not the other way round. This is very true of Afrikaans too. It is easier for an Afrikaner to understand Dutch but not the other way round. But you probably right I should have called it a l…

Right, Cypriot Greek is a dialect, similarly the German dialects spoken in Austria.

Afrikaans actually has an ISO-639 language code.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#46

Post by pbhjpbhj »

djm wrote: post #5
ique wrote: post #3

Very interesting article. Can't help but to think about the differences in countries educational systems. I'm Swedish, here we start studying English in second (numbers and such) and third grade (start with words and grammar). And then study it all the way up and through high-school. Pretty much every Swede of a younger generation is fluent in English. Almost all people also spend several years in grades 6-9 studying…

I'm from the UK and languages education here is (or at least was when I was at school) horrific. We didn't start learning a second language until secondary school (age 11/12) and the only options available were french and very basic german. My french teacher couldn't speak french properly - she used to look stuff up in study guides and read it, pretty badly, to us. Much of the focus was on memorising lists of words r…

>The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common

I'd say that the main argument in Britain is this. That so many lack basic English skills. Thus, any advance in English language abilities that can be gained is going to outweigh any minute slither of ability a pupil might manage to get in some language they never use outside the classroom.

I studied French in High School (from 11) but had already a smattering from family holidays and so realised it was useful and found it fun to some extent. Then age 13 I did a year of Russian (as I was top set for French) which was great as it was a non-European culture and uses cyrillic alphabet. German would however have been more use to me and would have given me exchange trip opportunities.

My problem is that I now live in Wales. The Welsh have this perverse notion that to be properly Welsh you must speak Welsh language; also by self-selection the Welsh language schools cream off a lot of more able pupils making them aspirational for the middle-classes. Welsh medium schools appear to get more funding too. All pupils from 4-16 years have to learn Welsh language in school. Knowing some people who've been through the system confirms for me that this is a complete waste. I have no problem with choosing Welsh for study in high school but forcing those - even with little to no English ability (a lot of Urdu and Bengali first language speakers live in my city) to learn a language that is only _spoken_ by 20% of people in this country...

Gah, I'm ranting. It makes me cross.

tl;dr the Welsh are hobbling their children for reasons of misplaced nationalism with a language only just brought back from the brink of death.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#47

Post by pbhjpbhj »

anuleczka wrote: post #4
rdtsc wrote: post #2

Apparently there is also a disadvantage -- a higher risk of developing stuttering. I know from experience (n=1), but there is some interesting research on the topic as well: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stuttering+bilingual+chi...

Interesting -- I've also experienced that. Sometimes it's because I can't think of the word I want to use in one language, but an equivalent word in the other language gets stuck in my mind. More info here: http://www.stutteringhelp.org/DeskLeftDefault.aspx?TabID=156

When studying French and German having most recently studied sign language I found it strange that this happened - that signs would come to me in place of the French (or German) word I was looking for. I assume this means that the actions in sign language are stored in the speech centres and that concept-word relationships are like 1-to-many connections with some flag for the language being used.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#48

Post by timwiseman »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #43
timwiseman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory, but there is no language other than English that is so widespread to make that particular langauage dominant. I think that within the limits of the resources, schools should try to offer a few choices and let the students choose. Sometimes a language will appeal to a student because something they are interested in is hea…

> learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory Would you include in this those who can't use a first language to any reasonable degree. Or those who already have the main language of the country (English say) as their second language? I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation…

I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation and ability of the students.

At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't.

At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.

Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums. My argument is that a second language should be one of those minimums, but that the choice of which language should be given (within resource limits) to the student or their family.

To answer your direct questions though, someone who cannot use a first language to any reasonable degree either has a learning disability or has been failed by the education system. In that second case, the education system has failed them and should take extraordinary measures to correct that without lowering the standards (my argument is that a second language should be part of those standards). And for people who are already fluent in a second language, they have already exceeded that requirement.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#49

Post by gahahaha »

kowen wrote: post #16
ibsulon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every American has two years of a foreign language in high school, and nearly every college requires two more years. I started Spanish in 7th grade and ended up with 5 years of study. However, I don't use is and as such, I've lost it.

I studied German for 4 years in school, and am far from fluent. I can painfully pick out details in a newspaper article, and can usually figure out if people are talking about soccer or food or whatever. On the other hand, I'm fluent in French, and learned that in France, not in school. In my experience, school wasn't a very efficient medium for learning languages.

I teach German in a (Norwegian) high school, and I think your experience is typical. Most pupils forget everything they have learned as soon as they can after the exams, and only a very very few will go to Germany and make use of it.

And the Germans speak pretty decent English by now, so the payoff is not as great as it was.

Re: The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

#50

Post by gahahaha »

joubert wrote: post #26
yannis wrote: post #11

My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans co…

Afrikaans is not a "sort of a Dutch dialect". It is a separate language, derived from Dutch (note, there are difference Afrikaans dialects). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans Interesting write-up of what is considered a "dialect", and how it differs from "language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect

If you put a lot of emphasis on "sort of" it is.
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