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By CLAUDIA DREIFUS A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science. We spoke for two hours in a Washington hotel room in February and again, more recently, by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows. Q. How did you begin studying bilingualism? A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area. But it was close enough. As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research. The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road. Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road? A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15382 - Posted: 05.31.2011

Humans wired for grammar at birth

By John Roach "Blueberry!" I tell my 15-month-old son as I hand him one, hoping that he makes the connection between the piece of fruit and its name as I daydream about the glorious day when he says, "Please, Dad, can I have another blueberry?" For now, he points at the bowl full of tasty morsels and babbles something incomprehensible. His pediatrician, family and friends all assure me that he's on the right track. Before I know it, he'll be rattling off the request for another blueberry and much, much more. This pointing and babbling is all a part of the language learning process, they say, even though the process itself remains largely a mystery. One prominent, though controversial, hypothesis is that some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. "There's some knowledge that the learner has that actually makes this process easier," Jennifer Culbertson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester, explained to me today. This hypothesis was originally proposed 50 years ago by philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Culbertson recently confirmed it with an experiment featuring a virtual green blob for a teacher named Glermi who speaks a nonsensical language called Verblog. © 2011 msnbc.com

Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed

By Victoria Gill Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists. A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire". The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other. The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition. Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures. "So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News. "We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour. "You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees." Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 15299 - Posted: 05.07.2011

A Thief That Robs the Brain of Language

By JANE E. BRODY Steve Riedner of Schaumberg, Ill., was a 55-year-old tool-and-die maker, a job that involves difficult mental calculations, and a frequent speaker at community meetings when he found himself increasingly at a loss for words and unable to remember numbers. He even began to have difficulty reading his own written comments. The neurologist he consulted thought Mr. Riedner had suffered a stroke and for three years treated him with cholesterol-lowering medication. But instead of his language ability stabilizing or improving, as should happen following a stroke, it got worse. A second neurologist concluded after further testing that Mr. Riedner might have a condition called primary progressive aphasia, or P.P.A., a form of dementia affecting the brain’s language center. Having seen only one other case in his career, the neurologist referred Mr. Riedner and his wife, Mary Beth, to the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at Northwestern University, whose director, Dr. M. Marsel Mesulam, is perhaps the world’s leading expert on this relatively rare disorder. P.P.A. is a clinical syndrome, one of several forms of brain disease lost in the medical shadow of their much better known relative Alzheimer’s disease. While hardly as common as Alzheimer’s, P.P.A. is often misdiagnosed, and many patients like Mr. Riedner lose valuable time trying inappropriate and ineffective treatments. Though there is no cure, patients and families can learn ways to minimize the disabilities it causes. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn

* By Brandon Keim It’s widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity’s major language families suggests otherwise. Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it’s likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated. “It’s terribly important to understand human cognition, and how the human mind is put together,” said Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and co-author of the new study, published April 14 in Nature. The findings “do not support simple ideas of the mind as a computer, with a language processor plugged in. They support much-more complex ideas of how language arises.” How languages have emerged and changed through human history is a subject of ongoing fascination. Language is, after all, the greatest of all social tools: It’s what lets people share and cooperate, divide labor, make plans, preserve knowledge, tell stories. In short, it lets humans be sophisticated social creatures. One school of thought, pioneered by linguist Noam Chomsky, holds that language is a product of dedicated mechanisms in the human brain. These can be imagined as a series of switches, each corresponding to particular forms of grammar and syntax and structure. Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born

By NICHOLAS WADE A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists. The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most. Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Are languages shaped by culture or cognition?

Philip Ball Languages evolve in their own idiosyncratic ways, rather than being governed by universal rules set down in human brain patterns. That is the conclusion of a study that compares the grammar of several hundred languages by looking at their evolutionary trees. Russell Gray, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his colleagues examined the relationships between traits such as the ordering of verbs and nouns in four linguistic families, and found no sign of any persistent, universal guiding principles (See 'Universal truths'). Their work is published today by Nature1. It is already proving controversial. "There is nothing in the paper that brings into question the views that they are arguing against," says Matthew Dryer, a linguist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Fixed patterns There are thought to be around 7,000 languages in the world today, and they show tremendous diversity in structure. Some, such as Finnish, have complex ways of making composite words, whereas others, such as Mandarin Chinese, have simple, short and invariant words. Some put verbs first in a sentence, others in the middle and yet others at the end. But many linguists suspect that there is some universal logic behind this bewildering variety — that common cognitive factors underpin grammatical structures. US linguists Noam Chomsky and Joseph Greenberg proposed two of the most prominent 'universalist' theories of language. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 15216 - Posted: 04.14.2011

Viral babbling baby video: is it real conversation?

by Deborah Kotz I can completely understand how this babbling baby video went viral. There's really no way to watch it without smiling in wonder at whether they're having a meaningful conversation and contemplating how language develops even before words are learned. Children's Hospital Boston did a fabulous analysis of the science of babbling babies on its health blog. In the post, Hope Dickinson, coordinator of the Speech-Language Pathology Services at Children’s Hospital, says the babies -- who are twins -- are engaging in conversational babbling and even displaying turn tallking where one "speaks," pauses and lets the other respond. (I love how they find each other humorous.) The babies even use various intonations. "There is a fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones," says Dickinson in the blog post. Sentences end with emphasis, and sometimes end with an upward inflection as if asking a question. The babies also gesture with their hands, which grownups -- myself included -- do all the time. And they look like they're understanding each other. Dickinson says this sort of babbling is normal for babies who will eventually replace all the da-da-da-ing with words. These babies seem to already have a few. One says "mama," and the other repeatedly says "up" when lifting a foot. Parents should expect to hear their babies babble by around 8 to 10 months or so and should begin to hear a few words by 12 to 14 months, according to Dickinson. If these milestones aren't being reached, they should speak to their child's pediatrician. © 2011 NY Times Co

When the mind's eye processes language

by Ferris Jabr The mind's eye can develop a knack for language in people who have been blind since birth. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures blood flow in the brain to determine which neurons are most active. Since the 1990s the technology has shown, surprisingly, that the visual cortex flares up even in blind people. More puzzlingly, this activity occurs when they were carrying out language tasks. Rebecca Saxe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the result seemed implausible, because the visual cortex isn't thought to be useful for language tasks. So to investigate, Saxe's team invited both sighted adults and those who had been blind since birth to listen to speech while lying inside an fMRI scanner. The team found that the language processing centres in the brains of all participants behaved almost identically, but the visual cortices of blind participants buzzed with far more activity than those of sighted people. "This was kind of crazy," says team member Evelina Fedorenko, also at MIT. "You have a portion of the brain which is there from birth to do something, but apparently it can acquire a new high-level function like language, which involves super complex cognitive processing." Fedorenko thinks that blind people who get a linguistic boost from their visual cortex might be better at language tasks than sighted people. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 15059 - Posted: 03.01.2011

In Film, Stuttering Symptoms Reflect Current Research

By PAM BELLUCK In the Oscar-nominated movie “The King’s Speech,” King George VI begins stuttering at 4 and struggles with it throughout his life. But he rarely talks like the stereotypical stutterer, Porky Pig, rapidly repeating letter sounds; usually the king has trouble getting sounds out from the get-go, blocked by sputtering pauses. His stutter is aggravated by stressful situations, like confronting his brother or addressing the public. He speaks better when playing with his daughters, singing words or inserting profanity, or when music blaring in his ears keeps him from hearing himself. These are complicated symptoms, but experts say these details, devised by a screenwriter who stuttered, mirror many aspects of actual stuttering. In that complexity are clues to this often devastating disorder’s cause, say scientists who are starting to untangle the underpinnings of stuttering in hopes of finding better treatment. Dispelling longstanding misconceptions that the underlying causes of stuttering are language problems or psychological problems like anxiety or trauma, researchers say stuttering is really a speech-production problem: a snag in the cascade of steps that our brains and bodies undertake to move the proper muscles to produce words. “People who stutter have motor difficulties in producing fluent speech,” said Luc De Nil, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Toronto. “They don’t have difficulty developing words or syntax, although they may process language differently. They have difficulty with efficient coordination of motor movements, and speech is such a high-demand fine-motor skill that requires extremely fast sequencing and timing.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 15048 - Posted: 02.26.2011

Brain’s Reading Center Isn’t Picky About Vision

By SINDYA N. BHANOO The part of the brain thought to be responsible for processing visual text may not require vision at all, researchers report in the journal Current Biology. This region, known as the visual word form area, processes words when people with normal vision read, but researchers found that it is also activated when the blind read using Braille. “It doesn’t matter if people are reading with their eyes or by their hands,” said Amir Amedi, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the study’s authors. “They are processing words.” The research counters the textbook belief that the brain is a sensory organ, in which various regions govern activities of the different senses, like sight, sound and touch. Instead, Dr. Amedi said, the brain is a task machine. “What we suggest is that what this area is doing is building the shape of the words, even though we call it the visual word form area,” he said. Dr. Amedi and his colleagues ran functional M.R.I. scans on eight adults with congenital blindness as they read using Braille. He and his colleagues belong to a small community of neuroscientists who are trying to demonstrate that the brain’s regions are multisensory. Although the theory has not become mainstream, it has been gaining acceptance in the past decade. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 15036 - Posted: 02.22.2011

Squeak defects in mice could help treat human stutterers

By Steve Connor, Science Editor The mystery of why some children begin to stutter in the first few years of life, and never fully recover from the speech impediment, may soon be solved with the creation of the world’s first “stuttering” mouse. Scientists have generated laboratory mice with the same genetic mutations believed to be involved in triggering the speech disorder in humans in the hope that the genetically engineered animals will provide new insights into understanding and treating the condition in people. The mice are currently undergoing tests to determine whether their high-pitched calls, which cannot be heard by the human ear, display any characteristic signs that could be linked with the mutations inserted into their DNA. The researchers believe that the prospect of creating stuttering laboratory mice could revolutionise research into the human condition because it would allow scientists to make detailed studies of the chemical changes within the brain cells of individuals with a stutter. Although not all stuttering is caused by genes alone, scientists have shown that a sizeable proportion of people who suffer from a stutter are likely to have inherited genetic mutations that predispose them to developing the condition, which usually begins between the ages of three or four. ©independent.co.uk

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 15031 - Posted: 02.21.2011

Speaking a second language can delay dementia onset for years

By Steve Connor Speaking a second language may slow the rate at which the brain declines with age, showing that bilingual people are better protected against Alzheimer's disease than people who use only one language. Several studies have now demonstrated a clear link between using a second language and cognitive decline, which can be explained by the idea that bilingualism acts like a "mental gymnasium" that keeps the brain active in later life, scientists said. The latest study, presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, found bilingual patients with probable Alzheimer's were more likely have delayed symptoms compared to monolingual patients. In fact, the effect of speaking a second language produced a stronger effect on delaying the onset of Alzheimer's than any drug currently used to control the disease, said Ellen Bialystok, professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. "The finding of a four- to five-year delay in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer's disease is dramatic. There are no pharmacologic interventions that have shown comparable effects." Our interpretation of the present findings is that bilingualism is a cognitively demanding condition that contributes to cognitive reserve in much the same way as do other stimulating intellectual and social activities." The researchers believe the effect is directly connected with using a second language, rather than a side-effect of differences in occupation or education between bilingual and monolingual people. Experiments suggest it has something to do with the extra mental effort that goes into using a second language, Professor Bialystok said. ©independent.co.uk

Bilingual babies cue in to languages

By Bruce Bower WASHINGTON — Babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual boost by 8 months of age that may set the stage for more resilient thinking later in life, scientists reported February 18 at the American Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia. Babies being raised to speak one language lack these visual discrimination skills, Werker and her colleagues have found. Given regular exposure to two languages, infants develop a general ability to track closely what they hear and see in decoding languages, Werker proposed. In the visual realm, such information may include lip movements, the rhythm of the jaw opening and closing, and the full ensemble of facial movements while talking. Her earlier studies found that newborn babies that had been exposed prenatally to two languages prefer to listen to those languages over others and distinguish between sounds in the tongues that they regularly hear spoken. “Bilingual infants are able to keep their languages distinct from birth and may develop an increased sensitivity to voice and face cues for different languages,” Werker said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Singing in the rain forest: Gibbons have accents

By Jennifer Welsh Gibbons have regional accents, a new study suggests. While not a sexy Southern drawl, these accents can help scientists identify the species of gibbon singing and where they are from. "Each gibbon has its own variable song but, much like people, there is a regional similarity between gibbons within the same location," lead researcher Van Ngoc Thinh, from the Primate Genetics Laboratory at the German Primate Center, said in a statement. The crested gibbons in the genus Nomascus, which live in the Asian rain forests of China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, use their songs to communicate with other gibbons. They also use singing to bond with mates and define territory. The songs are specifically adapted to travel over long distances through the dense vegetation of the rain forest by concentrating all of the energy into a single frequency, similar to the calls used by rain forest birds. After analyzing the singing of more than 400 gibbons from 92 groups in 24 locations (six different species all together), the researchers compared the song information with the species and location of the gibbons. They also compared it to the genetic variation between these groups. The researchers found that each group of gibbons had its own slightly different way of singing, which varied by location. The songs could be used to pinpoint a gibbon to a species and a location. © 2011 LiveScience.com

At Sundance, a science documentary revives language questions

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times Among the offerings at this year's Sundance Film Festival is a documentary about a trailblazing chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who played a key role in the scientific debate over what it means to be human. The James Marsh film, "Project Nim," explores the life of the primate — cheekily named after linguist Noam Chomsky — that was raised like a human child and taught American Sign Language in the 1970s in an effort to prove that language was not exclusive to humans. Four decades later, the questions raised by the experiment are still far from settled. As an infant, Chimpsky was taken to live with the LaFarge family in New York City. There, among seven human "siblings," he was raised just as a human child, taught to sign, dressed in sweaters, even breastfed from his human foster mother. Get important science news and discoveries delivered to your inbox with our Science & Environment newsletter. Sign up » "It was really 'Brady Bunch Plus Chimp,' with a mess of children coming and going," said Elizabeth Hess, whose book "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human" served as the foundation for the film. The arrangement was intended to settle a longstanding feud between Chomsky and psychologist B.F. Skinner about whether language was the key factor that separated humans from other animals, Hess said: "Skinner argued that even chimps could acquire language and Chomsky said language was exclusive to humans." Los Angeles Times, Copyright 2011

Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!

By NICHOLAS WADE Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language. Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes. He bought Chaser as a puppy in 2004 from a local breeder and started to train her for four to five hours a day. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She was taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten. Border collies are working dogs. They have a reputation for smartness, and they are highly motivated. They are bred to herd sheep indefatigably all day long. Absent that task, they must be given something else to do or they go stir crazy. Chaser proved to be a diligent student. Unlike human children, she seems to love her drills and tests and is always asking for more. “She still demands four to five hours a day,” Dr. Pilley said. “I’m 82, and I have to go to bed to get away from her.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Stuttering, even if not as severe as in 'The King's Speech,' can be shameful

By Dan Slater What I remember most about my stutter is not the stupefying vocal paralysis, the pursed eyes or the daily ordeal of gagging on my own speech, sounds ricocheting off the back of my teeth like pennies trying to escape a piggy bank. Those were merely the mechanics of stuttering, the realities to which one who stutters adjusts his expectations of life. Rather, what was most pervasive about my stutter is the strange role it played in determining how I felt about others, about you. My stutter became a barometer of how much confidence I felt in your presence. Did I perceive you as friendly, patient, kind? Or as brash and aggressive? How genuine was your smile? Did you admire my talents, or were you wary of my more unseemly traits? In this way I divided the world into two types of people: those around whom I stuttered and those around whom I might not. The onset of my stutter occurred under typical circumstances: I was 4; I had a father who carried a stutter into adulthood; and, at the time, my parents were engaged in a bitter, protracted, Reagan-era divorce that seemed destined for mutually assured destruction. My mother chronicled my speech problems in her diaries from the period. Sept. 26, 1981: "Daniel has been biting his fingernails for the past several weeks; along with stuttering up." July 8, 1982: "After phone call [with his father] Danny stuttering quite a bit, blocking on words." © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 14814 - Posted: 12.22.2010

How Reading Rewires the Brain

by Greg Miller Written language poses a puzzle for neuroscientists. Unlocking the meaning in a string of symbols requires complex neural circuitry. Yet humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years—too short for major evolutionary changes. Instead, reading likely depends on circuits that originally evolved for other purposes. But which ones? To investigate, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, teamed up with colleagues in France, Belgium, Portugal, and Brazil to scan the brains of 63 volunteers, including 31 who learned to read in childhood, 22 who learned as adults, and 10 who were illiterate. Those who could read, regardless of when they learned, exhibited more vigorous responses to written words in several areas of the brain that process what we see, the group reports online today in Science. Based on previous work, Dehaene has argued that one of these areas, at the junction of the left occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, is especially important for reading. In literate, but not illiterate, people, written words also triggered brain activity in parts of the left temporal lobe that respond to spoken language. That suggests that reading utilizes brain circuits that evolved to support spoken language, a much older innovation in human communication, Dehaene says. It makes sense that reading would rely on brain regions that originally evolved to process vision and spoken language, says Dehaene. But this repurposing may have involved a tradeoff. The researchers found that in people who learned to read early in life, a smaller region of the left occipital-temporal cortex responded to images of faces than in the illiterate volunteers. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 14659 - Posted: 11.13.2010

Bilingualism Good for the Brain

By Jessica Marshall Bilingual education is controversial in the United States, but a growing body of research shows that regularly speaking two languages comes with certain types of improved mental performance. In a Perspective article appearing today in the journal Science, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" highlights studies of bilingualism that show this effect. Diamond began wondering about the effects on the brain of multilingualism while camping with New Guinea Highlanders, all of whom could speak between five and 15 languages. "What are the cognitive effects of such multilingualism?" Diamond asked in the new article. "Being able to use two languages and never knowing which one you're going to use right now rewires your brain," said Ellen Bialystok of York University in Toronto, Canada, whose work Diamond cited repeatedly in the article. "The attentional executive system which is crucial for all higher thought -- it's the most important cognitive piece in how we think -- that system seems to be enhanced," she noted. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

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