Languages a question of brainBy: Lic. Kelly Ferny Sanlo

Languages a question of brain

Introduction:

Brain has a powerful memory and a powerful structure, it means that the moreyou are motivated the more you will acquire any skill of your interest.

For years scientist have been investigated the brain of humans that have the skillof speaking over five languages in many different ways, so they have the cluebecause there are more people demonstrating that those theories areconvincing.

The brain

The brain is made of three main parts: the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain.The forebrain consists of the cerebrum, thalamus, and hypothalamus (part of thelimbic system). The midbrain consists of the tectum and tegmentum. Thehindbrain is made of the cerebellum, pons and medulla. Often the midbrain,pons, and medulla are referred to together as the brainstem.

Functions

Frontal Lobe- associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement,emotions, and problem solving

Parietal Lobe- associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception ofstimuli

Occipital Lobe- associated with visual processing

Temporal Lobe- associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli,memory, and speech

Differences between people who does speak many languages to people who only speaks one

One of the most famous hyperpolyglots in history was Emil Krebs, a 19th centuryGerman diplomat who, by some accounts, had mastered 65 languages by thetime of his death. In 2004, scientists had the opportunity to dissect Krebs’s brainin an effort to confirm whether his impressive language skills were due to aunique brain structure. While they observed distinct differences in the region ofKrebs’s brain responsible for language — known as Broca’s area — they wereultimately unable to answer whether his unique brain was different since birth orif it grew to be that way from learning so many new languages

Today, we know multilinguals and hyperpolyglots have distinct differences in theirbrains’ neural activity when compared to people who can only speak one language.This is because the human brain is a highly adaptive organ. Any type of cognitiveactivity, whether it’s doing a puzzle, playing an instrument, or learning a language,can build new neural pathways.

Language learning in particular creates new pathways that not only strengthen thebrains of multilingual individuals but also facilitate further language learning. In a2014 experiment, for example, brain scans showed people who spoke only onelanguage had to work harder to focus on a single word. Ellen Bialystok, apsychologist at York University in Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the study, toldLiveScience this happened because multilingual brains are more efficient at tuningout irrelevant information.

Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the questionin German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakersof the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences,influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work alsofinds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be moreflexible.

Cognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you thinksince the 1940s. The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number ofstudies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certainfeatures of the world. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue thanEnglish speakers, for example. And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by materialrather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Still,skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect culturaldifferences between speakers that are unrelated to language.

In the new study, researchers turned to people who speak multiple languages. Bystudying bilinguals, “we’re taking that classic debate and turning it on its head,” sayspsycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.Rather than ask whether speakers of different languages have different minds, he says,“we ask, ‘Can two different minds exist within one person?’

Athanasopoulos and colleagues were interested in a particular difference in how Englishand German speakers treat events. English has a grammatical toolkit for situatingactions in time: "I was sailing to Bermuda and I saw Elvis” is different from "I sailed toBermuda and I saw Elvis.” German doesn’t have this feature. As a result, Germanspeakers tend to specify the beginnings, middles, and ends of events, but Englishspeakers often leave out the endpoints and focus in on the action. Looking at the samescene, for example, German speakers might say, “A man leaves the house and walks tothe store,” whereas an English speaker would just say, “A man is walking.”

This linguistic difference seems to influence how speakers of the two languagesview events, according to the new study. Athanasopoulos and colleagues asked 15native speakers of each language to watch a series of video clips that showedpeople walking, biking, running, or driving. In each set of three videos, theresearchers asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (awoman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a womanwalks down a country lane). German speakers matched ambiguous scenes withgoal-oriented scenes about 40% of the time on average, compared with 25%among English speakers. This difference implies that German speakers are morelikely to focus on possible outcomes of people’s actions, but English speakers paymore attention to the action itself.

Bilingual speakers, meanwhile, seemed to switch between these perspectives based on thelanguage most active in their minds. The researchers found that 15 Germans fluent in English werejust as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. Buta similar group of 15 German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were justas action-focused as native English speakers. This change could also be seen as an effect of culture,but a second experiment showed that bilinguals can also switch perspectives as fast as they canswitch languages.

In another group of 30 German-English bilinguals, the researchers kept one language busy duringthe video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in eitherEnglish or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of theother language to the fore. When researchers “blocked” English, subjects acted like typical Germansand saw ambiguous videos as more goal-oriented. With German blocked, bilingual subjects actedlike English speakers and matched ambiguous and open-ended scenes. When the researcherssurprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through theexperiment, the subjects’ focus on goals versus process switched right along with it.

The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious rolein framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in PsychologicalScience. “By having another language, you have an alternative vision of the world,”Athanasopoulos says. “You can listen to music from only one speaker, or you canlisten in stereo … It’s the same with language.”

“This is an important advance,” says cognitive scientist Phillip Wolff of EmoryUniversity in Atlanta who wasn’t connected to the study. “If you’re a bilingualspeaker, you’re able to entertain different perspectives and go back and forth,” hesays. “That really hasn’t been shown before.”

But researchers who doubt that language plays a central role in thinking are likelyto remain skeptical. The artificial laboratory setting may make people rely onlanguage more than they normally would, says cognitive psychologist Barbara Maltof Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “In a real-world situation, I couldfind reasons to pay attention to the continuity of an action and other reasonswhere I would pay attention to the endpoint,” she says. “Nothing says I have to bea bilingual to do that … It doesn’t mean language is the lens through which I seethe world.”

Posted in: Brain & Behavior, Social Sciences

Ways of learning

The brain is the main author for each one, as far as I am concerned there aremany theories that can explain what is happening in our acquisition of anylanguage but for each person there is a theory, I am trying to say that eachperson is an independent individual that has its way to acquire any knowledgefor instance there are people who learn languages just at hearing, there arepeople who born with the ability of languages (Chomsky´s theory), there arepeople who learn languages by context, by interact with others ( Vygotsky'stheory) and there are people who learn languages because they want to learnand they have the motivation of learning.

The ability of adquiring languages

My own experience

I remember when I was a child I used to listen my grandmother talking inPapiamento so at that age I received that input and I have the ability ofunderstand that language, then when I was like 9 years old I listened to my uncleand my aunt talking in English and I got the ability of pronounce words in Englishin an excellent way, so I grow up with the ability of learning languages.

In some years later those abilities were increasing by studying with themotivation of learning any of those language I consider interesting: English,French and German without taking into account my mother tongue which isSpanish; acquiring this one as natural way to understand and growing up in anenvironment which the main language is Spanish.

Conclusion

According to those theories and in agreement with all the things I mentionedbefore, languages are a question of brain so we have a great structure in ourbrain that can deal with an amazing ability of learning not only languages butalso another things we are interesting in.

We can also mention that a motivated person is a machine of creativity and aleader of its own future of success.

Bibliography

Brain Structures and their Functions © by Serendip 1994-2017

Differences between people who does speak many languages to people who only speaks one Brain & Behavior, Social Sciences