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posted by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @08:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the materia-gris dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 17 2015, @11:06PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 17 2015, @11:06PM (#210647) Journal

    It also makes reading so much easier when you have an idea what those glyphs on the page are supposed to sound like.)

    This is dead on. It's one of the hardest things about learning Japanese, for example, because the kanji have so many readings--you don't know which it's supposed to be unless you speak the language or somebody takes pity on you and throws in furigana as a superscript. Sort of the same with tri-consonantal roots in Arabic. If you know what the vowels are supposed to be you don't care that the author of a sentence didn't supply the diacritics.

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