10 ms·

The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages

80 points by fogus 17y ago

rdtsc 17y ago
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+children http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stuttering+bilingual+chi...
- anuleczka 17y ago
  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 http://www.stutteringhelp.org/DeskLeftDefault.aspx?TabID=156
  - nwatson 17y ago
    My father is American, approaching 80 years of age, and has been living away from Brazil (in the U.S.) for the last 25 years. Even so every few English sentences he pauses to find the English word he's looking for, often saying the Portuguese word first. Lately he's just been saying the Portuguese word without bothering to translate, meaning I end up translating a lot of words/concepts on the side when he's talking to my American wife. My father spent the "core" of his adult life in Brazil and dealt with every-day concerns in Portuguese. He traveled a lot away from his English-speaking family and was immersed much of the time. He practiced his domain expertise (soul-saving) in Portuguese. In most matters he's just more comfortable in Portuguese and Spanish, and it certainly shows when he speaks English.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    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.
- riahi 17y ago
  Prior to college, I only spoke 3 languages (Persian/Spanish/English) and didn't have this problem at all, since all three were learned when younger. However, in college, I took Portuguese for Spanish native speakers and got conversationally fluent really fast. But, as a consequence, it seems I've started stuttering in English, while knowing the word in Persian instead. I wonder if this is related to my Portuguese...
ique 17y ago
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 a third language (Spanish, French or German is required to take if you don't have a learning disability, then you focus on English with that time instead). It's easy for practically every country in the world to offer education in English because you can't live in a modern world without English. But it seems hard to motivate English speaking nations to study other languages. What languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make it obligatory education?
- djm 17y ago
  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 rather than learning to build sentences etc. I don't think my experience was that unusual. The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common, but ridiculous. We all travel and migrate more than we used to and this trend will presumably increase over time. Being the odd one out in a group because you only speak english feels like a disability in many places. It's especially embarrassing when the group speaks english to include you thus highlighting the difference even more. I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US. I would have assumed that most children, especially those in California, would be required to learn spanish. Maybe some french for those living near the border with french speaking parts of Canada. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's well established that learning a foreign language is easiest as a child. Perhaps the best way to make a monolingual nation multilingual is to adopt a policy of favouritism in hiring teachers for young children who are bi-lingual.
  - garnet7 17y ago
ggruschow 17y ago
Where's the control group? The study seems to compare two skills in bilingual kids only. It's interesting, but it doesn't seem to tell us anything about the advantage of speaking 2 languages.. like single language kids could read 2x as fast and the results wouldn't change.. or those words may happen to be easy ones anyway (seems somewhat likely if they happened to occur if those combinations of letters happened to appear in both languages).
yannis 17y ago
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 conversation or vice versa. He is thirteen now and speaks both languages very fluently (but the switching between the two languages now is more conscious). At the toddler stage it was as if his brain was combining the two languages into one. From my own personal experience I noted that, there is a point when you start to think - in the new language and that is the real turning point. It also appears sort of in computer languages as well. When people from different linguistic cultures mix they tend to develop their own language for example fanagalo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo]. This paper from the Center for Applied Linguistics has some good pointers http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html as regards to languages and education.
- kowen 17y ago
  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 English words all the time (because I can get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French into it. Where I really get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.
  - yannis 17y ago
    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.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
eru 17y ago
Interesting that most of the discussion here makes bilingualism seem like the pinnacle of achievement. But I guess I belittle bilingualism because I am fluent in two languages and strive for three or four.
- gahahaha 17y ago
  It is a big step up from just speaking one. :-) (working on my fourth)
- Kliment 17y ago
  I'm fluent in four, but the vast majority of people in the US appear to speak only one. The case is similar in Germany, France and Spain, at least from my experience. As such, bilingualism is not a pinnacle of achievement (is anything ever a pinnacle of achievement) but rather a recognition that ANY other language has value of this kind. Once you get past "I can do just fine with one." you can go as far as you like. But the step from one to two seems to be the critical one.
  - eru 17y ago
    Yes, I agree. Most young people in Germany seem to be able to speak at least some English. Almost all university students do. Bilingualism is prevalent in countries that have a first language other than English, since everyone accept that learning English is necessary. (Disclaimer: I was born in Germany.)
jcl 17y ago
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.
ebun 17y ago
On a related note, the NY Times posted recently about Chinese being on the rise as the foreign language to learn in American schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html

80 points by fogus 17y ago

rdtsc 17y ago

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+children http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=stuttering+bilingual+chi...

anuleczka 17y ago
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 http://www.stutteringhelp.org/DeskLeftDefault.aspx?TabID=156
- nwatson 17y ago
  My father is American, approaching 80 years of age, and has been living away from Brazil (in the U.S.) for the last 25 years. Even so every few English sentences he pauses to find the English word he's looking for, often saying the Portuguese word first. Lately he's just been saying the Portuguese word without bothering to translate, meaning I end up translating a lot of words/concepts on the side when he's talking to my American wife. My father spent the "core" of his adult life in Brazil and dealt with every-day concerns in Portuguese. He traveled a lot away from his English-speaking family and was immersed much of the time. He practiced his domain expertise (soul-saving) in Portuguese. In most matters he's just more comfortable in Portuguese and Spanish, and it certainly shows when he speaks English.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  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.
riahi 17y ago
Prior to college, I only spoke 3 languages (Persian/Spanish/English) and didn't have this problem at all, since all three were learned when younger. However, in college, I took Portuguese for Spanish native speakers and got conversationally fluent really fast. But, as a consequence, it seems I've started stuttering in English, while knowing the word in Persian instead. I wonder if this is related to my Portuguese...

ique 17y ago

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 a third language (Spanish, French or German is required to take if you don't have a learning disability, then you focus on English with that time instead). It's easy for practically every country in the world to offer education in English because you can't live in a modern world without English. But it seems hard to motivate English speaking nations to study other languages. What languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make it obligatory education?

djm 17y ago
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 rather than learning to build sentences etc. I don't think my experience was that unusual. The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common, but ridiculous. We all travel and migrate more than we used to and this trend will presumably increase over time. Being the odd one out in a group because you only speak english feels like a disability in many places. It's especially embarrassing when the group speaks english to include you thus highlighting the difference even more. I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US. I would have assumed that most children, especially those in California, would be required to learn spanish. Maybe some french for those living near the border with french speaking parts of Canada. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's well established that learning a foreign language is easiest as a child. Perhaps the best way to make a monolingual nation multilingual is to adopt a policy of favouritism in hiring teachers for young children who are bi-lingual.
- garnet7 17y ago

ggruschow 17y ago

Where's the control group? The study seems to compare two skills in bilingual kids only. It's interesting, but it doesn't seem to tell us anything about the advantage of speaking 2 languages.. like single language kids could read 2x as fast and the results wouldn't change.. or those words may happen to be easy ones anyway (seems somewhat likely if they happened to occur if those combinations of letters happened to appear in both languages).

yannis 17y ago

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 conversation or vice versa. He is thirteen now and speaks both languages very fluently (but the switching between the two languages now is more conscious). At the toddler stage it was as if his brain was combining the two languages into one. From my own personal experience I noted that, there is a point when you start to think - in the new language and that is the real turning point. It also appears sort of in computer languages as well. When people from different linguistic cultures mix they tend to develop their own language for example fanagalo [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanagalo]. This paper from the Center for Applied Linguistics has some good pointers http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html http://www.cal.org/resources/Digest/digestglobal.html as regards to languages and education.

kowen 17y ago
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 English words all the time (because I can get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French into it. Where I really get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.
- yannis 17y ago
  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.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

eru 17y ago

Interesting that most of the discussion here makes bilingualism seem like the pinnacle of achievement. But I guess I belittle bilingualism because I am fluent in two languages and strive for three or four.

gahahaha 17y ago
It is a big step up from just speaking one. :-) (working on my fourth)
Kliment 17y ago
I'm fluent in four, but the vast majority of people in the US appear to speak only one. The case is similar in Germany, France and Spain, at least from my experience. As such, bilingualism is not a pinnacle of achievement (is anything ever a pinnacle of achievement) but rather a recognition that ANY other language has value of this kind. Once you get past "I can do just fine with one." you can go as far as you like. But the step from one to two seems to be the critical one.
- eru 17y ago
  Yes, I agree. Most young people in Germany seem to be able to speak at least some English. Almost all university students do. Bilingualism is prevalent in countries that have a first language other than English, since everyone accept that learning English is necessary. (Disclaimer: I was born in Germany.)

jcl 17y ago

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.

ebun 17y ago

On a related note, the NY Times posted recently about Chinese being on the rise as the foreign language to learn in American schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21chinese.html