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A new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggests people who speak two languages have more gray matter in the executive control region of the brain.
In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control."
This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated.
I find learning more languages makes it easier to acquire new ones because you get better at it, but idiomatic speech and use of metaphor seem to take a real hit.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Friday July 17 2015, @09:05PM
I've had about 8 years of learning Spanish. I still can't speak it very fast or well, but I can read and write it more than well enough to get by, long as anyone I have to interact with is patient enough to wait for me to write out whatever.
That's probably due to not interacting with enough people that speak it though. Back when I did helldesk stuff, we didn't have any fluent Spanish speaking people in our region. This netted me the dubious position of email answerer for anything coming from Latin/South America. People would send me the funniest things and tell me to respond to it for them. I remember getting Portuguese and even French emails more than a couple of times and responding, "This is x language. I cannot help you with it. Better contact the Account Manager and hope they pick up." I'm surprised with how people can't tell the difference sometimes. I mean, I can't tell what every language is just by looking at it, but for the three most common foreign languages we saw, there's enough tells in them to at least have a good indication of what you're looking at, even if you can't read it.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!