Language students, you may very well be preserving your mental health! New research demonstrates that learning another language could prevent the onset of the cognitive disease dementia. Being able to speak two languages makes the brain work harder, and is therefore more resilient in later life; according to the study, which was conducted at Toronto’s York University.
The researchers examined hospital records of patients diagnosed with a variety of different types of dementia, and found that those who were bilingual were diagnosed with dementia three to four years later than patients who were only able to speak one language.
Dr Ellen Bialystok, respected psychologist and leader of the study, said
“Our conclusion is that lifelong experience in managing attention to two languages reorganizes specific brain networks, creating a more effective basis for executive control and sustaining better cognitive performance throughout the lifespan.
‘It should not be surprising that intense and sustained experience leaves its mark on our minds and brains, and it is now clear that the bilingual brain has been uniquely shaped by experience.”
March 22, 2012 at 11:14 pm
· Filed under Biological, Education · Posted by Emma
I’ve always thought of my multi-lingual friends as supremely clever people, and it turns out this belief is now supported by science!
Researchers at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, have found that bi-lingual people have a heightened ability to monitor their environment. Lead researcher in Speech Production and Bi-lingualism, Albert Costa Martinez, explains further; “Bi-linguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language. It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.”
The study compared bi-linguals with monolinguals whilst monitoring various tasks. The research concluded that the bi-linguals not only performed better, but they used less brain activity to assess behavioural tasks, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
With Valentine’s Day approaching, you might want to know how to say “I love you” in another language. According to Google Data, more than 29 million searches are made every month for that very phrase.
The most popular searches are for the phrase in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Korean and Arabic. Instead of using Google Translate, online tool Omniglot is worth a look, it has a pretty comprehensive directory of “I love you” in these languages and many more you may never have heard of.
In other love and language news, scientists at the University of Texas have just published a new study on “function words.” These are described as everyday words which we use all the time, such as the, a, and and. The report investigates the way people speak, rather than what they say, and examines whether the speaking and writing styles couples adopt during conversation with each other can affect long-term strength of relationships. They conducted two experiments in which a computer program compared partners’ language styles.
You can “test” how compatible you are with your partner (according to whether you have matching language styles) by using study co-author James Pennebaker’s interactive application.
New research from British scientists at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology shows that infants can recognise their mother’s voice, rather than the words, in any language; demonstrating that tone is key to voice recognition.
Researchers studied 84 babies aged between 14 and 18 months and conducted two studies – one in English and the other in Greek. None of the babies had prior exposure to the Greek language.
Research leader Dr Merideth Gattis explained, “in this research we aimed to investigate the contribution of prosodic cues, or tone of voice, to infants’ understanding of mental states. Tone of voice is a really useful signal to what someone is thinking. We used the words ‘whoops’ and ‘there’ accompanied by relative vocal inflections in two languages and got exactly the same results – whether in English or Greek, which none of the children understood.
This study showed us that children can judge the intentions of other people based on tone of voice alone. The acoustic features of speech accompanying actions allow infants to identify intention in perceptually similar actions. They are able to use prosodic cues as a guide to how to act on the world, demonstrated by their tendency to copy intentional actions more than accidental actions.”
When I first saw the link to this article about tweeting and grammar, I thought it was talking about people using Twitter in a grammatically correct way. I thought this was both fantastic and statistically unlikely.
It turns out that the article is talking about a species of bird, the Bengal finch, that appears to recognise some kind of grammar within its bird songs. Bengal finches make a lot of noise when they hear unfamiliar bird songs, most probably related to maintaining their territory in the face of strange birds. Scientists familiarised a group of finches with a new song, which they then ‘remixed’ by cutting it and putting it back together in four different ways.
The birds only reacted strongly to one of these four mixes, leading researchers to believe that this particular version had broken some cardinal rule of finch grammar. Birds raised in isolation didn’t react to this breach of grammar, but they did after spending two weeks with normal birds. There were also some brain lesion experiments conducted that suggested that the birds had a particular area dedicated to ‘speech’ recognition and production.
I’ve just finished reading The Word Brain by Bernd Sebastian Kamps. Its tagline is A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning. Initial caps aside, it’s a 70-page document that covers (with a single chapter each) Kamps’s advice on words, listening, reading, teachers, speaking, memory, and nailing. The latter is a term he uses to better encompass the concept of learning a word by heart.
Kamps’s methods are not for the faint of heart, and he mentions this right at the beginning of the book. He presents the total number of hours you are likely to need to reach a competent language level (being able to at least follow along with newspapers and TV news), and drums in the fact that you will need multiple hours of study multiple times a week to make good progress. I agree with this (even though it’s not always possible for people to commit this amount of time).
He puts the different skills into a logical recommended order – listening, reading, then speaking. The kicker is that Kamps suggests not attempting to speak at all until a few months into the language learning process. His reasoning behind this is sound – receiving more input first will invariably improve your understanding, accent, and pronunciation – but I can’t help but feel that this would be a nearly impossible task for a regular person. I’m not sure what he would suggest for those of us who are somewhere in the middle of our language learning process.
The book contains some useful information about spaced repetition, a good introduction to the way the brain stores information, and some very good comparisons between the way children and adults learn language. He also debunks the myth that children are better language learners than adults (and I should add that it is with hindsight that most adults think that language learning was easy when they were children). One piece of new information for me is that if you push any new information into your brain after studying (including spending time on your favourite social network), it will decrease the likelihood that you will remember what you studied later. So, after studying, do something relaxing instead.
According to Kamps, the ideal situation for a language learner would be to be young, have a lot of time, be living in a foreign language immersion situation, and to have a speaker of the language as a lover. Now, most of us will never be in this situation (sadly), but all it means is that the learning will take more time and perhaps more dedication. This book contains a lot of interesting information and suggestions, and I’d like to hear what advice you will take away from it. Let me know in the comments!
Download the full e-book, short version, and mp3 at The Word Brain.
December 9, 2010 at 10:00 am
· Filed under Accents, Biological, News · Posted by Wendy
I’m sure it’s happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you’re doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven’t noticed.
So, it turns out that accent imitation, besides being used for intentional and accidental mockery of others, can actually help you to understand the speaker’s accent. A study in the Netherlands has shown that if accented speech is repeated, it helps the listener to better understand it.
The participants in the study were first asked to listen to an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To ensure that the accent was unfamiliar to everyone, the researchers made up a new accent by doing a consistent vowel sound change. After this, the participants were asked to listen to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent. Participants were asked to respond to the sentences in different ways: some repeated the sentence aloud while trying to mimic the new accent, some repeated it in their own accent, some transcribed the sentence, and some only listened. When the sentences were tested again, those that had repeated using the unfamiliar accent did far better than the other groups.
Unfortunately, in real life, even if you know this information it’s not very polite to talk to someone while trying to imitate their speech patterns. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could always use this study as justification.
I’d heard that people are more likely to believe a person who speaks with the same accent as them (meaning people will be more likely to think that foreigners are untrustworthy*), and another study has shown some interesting results when comparing listener reactions to different accents.
The study, conducted at the University of Glasgow, used fMRI scans to analyse brain activity in Scottish listeners when they heard people speaking in American, English**, and Scottish accents. Participants listened to recordings of nine different female voices: three of each of American, English, and Scottish accents. The research found that brain activity was significantly different between listening to a native accent and a foreign one (even though all were speaking the same language).
“The pattern of neural activity differed strikingly in response to their own specific accent compared with other English accents,” Bestelmeyer said. “The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that ‘in-group’ voices are processed differently from the ‘out-group.’”
My impression is that it takes a bit more work to understand a foreign accent, which would mean that people might unintentionally seek out people who speak in the same way, as it’s easier on the brain. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily related to in-group and out-group issues. It’s logical that a person finds it easier to understand the speech they have heard all their lives. What do you think?
*I wonder what kind of Google searches will be drawn in by this phrase.
**The article uses ‘British’, but I chose to use ‘English’, as that’s what I assume they meant (Scottish accents are also British accents).
July 6, 2010 at 10:00 am
· Filed under Biological, Unspoken · Posted by Wendy
I was just listening to a 60 Minutes podcast and there was a really interesting story about a woman who has been studying the same group of African elephants for almost two decades. American scientist Andrea Turkalo has been studying their behaviour, and focusing particularly on the way they communicate. She can now identify not only what different sounds mean (including greetings, sadness, anger, and all clear), but can even tell the animals apart by their voices. Turkalo’s long years of research are leading towards a greater understanding of elephant behaviour and social interactions, and even towards a dictionary of sorts, so other people can also understand the communication between the animals.
One of the big steps that lead to a lot more understanding was realising that a lot of the noises that elephants make are actually subsonic – so low that humans can’t hear them. These low frequencies are used to communicate and locate other elephants to a range of over 2km. When researchers realised that these sounds existed, they began speeding up their recordings so the sounds became audible, and also examined wave forms on screen.
The range of different ‘expressions’ that elephants use is huge, and the research is fascinating.
For more information, read the transcript, or listen to the podcast (episode released 04 July, ‘The Secret Language of Elephants’ starts around 14:00).
In the kind of news story that you wouldn’t even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines.
She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below). Unfortunately there’s no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like.
Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the perceived accent change. As she mentions in the video, she is unsure how long it will last for. Apparently some people who suffer this kind of change recover after some time.
It’s nice that her mental capacity seems unchanged, although I think it would frustrate me no end to have people think I was a bit simple because of the way I spoke!
I’ve just finished reading 
I’m sure it’s happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you’re doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven’t noticed.
I was just listening to a 
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