SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @03:58AM
Most people who claim to be multilingual really aren't. Some are, most aren't.
If you only know how to speak within 1 language group, such as Italian and French, then you aren't multilingual, sorry. You simply know 2 vocabulary sets for the same language. It's like claiming to know 2 different programming languages because you changed the names of all the variables in the standard library.
Real multilingualism is learning 2 languages that are actually different. Such as learning English and Japanese. Or learning Russian and German. Or learning French and Swahili. Languages reflect the evolution of the culture that created them, to really have a mind for them you have to be able to "think" like the people in that culture.
On a side note, many people tend to look down their nose at Americans for only speaking one language. In my observation, the majority of "bilingual" people only speak English and their native language, and the same can be said of Americans. The irony is that so many of them only learned English from watching American's exported television, movies, news, etc (but would never admit it). "English and your own native language" also isn't a great sign of linguistic study, more so just a sign that you watch foreign TV.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:27AM
Wouldn't that make you feel better? Alas, you, and the moderator who modded your comment "informative", are clinging to the no true Scotsman fallacy. The study found that larger gray matter correlates with Spanish-English bilingualism compared to just English. They disproved your hypothesis before you even wrote it down.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:06AM
If you don't know what the phrase "No true Scotsman" means, then you really shouldn't accuse other people of making that mistake. "No true Scotsman" refers to choosing definitions for the sake of establishing the question, rather than choosing them in a more sound and generally useful fashion.
When I say that learning 2 languages in the same language group isn't really being bilingual, it is just learning a new vocabulary, it isn't "No true Scotsman". I'm making the very point that it is a more natural definition. As stated, language is more than vocabulary, it is grammar, culture, different styles of logic, etc. Simply learning vocabulary isn't the same as learning language.
And as far as their articles claim goes, it isn't surprising at all. "People who are proficient at X have more grey matter" is probably true of anything that requires memorization or fast mental acuity. Such as being a concert pianist, or an electrical engineer, or a top poker player. Is it more likely that learning language made your brain grow, or that people with strong mental abilities learned some vocabulary or language in their free time?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:59PM
Spanish and English are from different language groups, just like Russian and German. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a Romance language. Of course, all these languages are Indo-European languages, but that's a really big group of languages that spans most of the world, except for African, far east, and Pacific Island languages, and some other aboriginal languages.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:42AM
Your post would be well described as "a crock of shit."
There's a hell of a lot more to fluency than a vocabulary. Fluency requires (among other things) cultural knowledge and not just memorization of a list of words. This is true even for related languages, not just for radically different languages.
The problem with many Americans is not that they only speak one language. It's that they think there's something wrong with speaking more than one language.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:26AM
There's a hell of a lot more to fluency than a vocabulary. Fluency requires (among other things) cultural knowledge and not just memorization of a list of words. This is true even for related languages, not just for radically different languages.
If you know English, you can become proficient in Spanish by just memorizing a thousand words or so and remembering to put some adjectives after nouns. There are a few variations on verb tense, but 99% of the grammar is the same, as it is for other Latin/Germanic languages.
The alphabet is the same, the pronunciation of almost all letters of the alphabet is the same, 99% of the phonemes are close enough.
The same cannot be said of Russian, or Japanese, or Arabic. It is not a small difference. Whenever someone claims to be multilingual, ask them what languages they know. It's almost always "Native language and English" (aka watches foreign TV), or "Language of my country and a neighboring country". It's almost never "oh I know Arabic and English and Chinese". Pretending that knowing multiple languages from the same language group is on par with learning languages from unrelated cultures across the earth suggests a lack of understand of how hard learning a truly foreign language actually is. Linguists who actually accomplish proficiency in multiple unrelated language are amazing, and shouldn't be slighted by being grouped together with the vocabulary memorizers.
The problem with many Americans is not that they only speak one language. It's that they think there's something wrong with speaking more than one language.
You really think that there are a significant number of Americans walking around saying "That guy knows multiple languages, let's beat the crap out of him!" ? Is it more likely that your actual complaint is that you want Americans to be forced to learn multiple languages, to appease some politically correct sense of multiculturalism?
I could make the counter accusation: "The problem with many Europeans is not that they can't figure out which language to speak. It's that they think that there's some intellectual virtue in memorizing vocabulary from more than one language."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:47PM
Of course some languages are more similar to each other and are easier to learn, but in no way is Spanish just English with some inverted word order. Not even close.
The verb conjugation system is totally different, words have gender in Spanish (English has no gender) and words must match each other in gender and number.
Plus the one thing that *all* languages have that must simply be memorized: idioms. These are expressions that have meaning only as an entire unit but make no sense when broken down into their component words.
An example: That is the author's best work "by a long chalk".
Another, in Spanish: "Era un olla de grillos". In English, "It was a pot of crickets." Meaning: It was a disorganized mess with nobody being able to come to a consensus or understanding.
And then there is simply knowing the common (idiomatic) way of expressing something and using it so you don't sound like a foreigner who doesn't know the language. "Do the needful!"