Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Potato, Patata The Advantages of Crossing the Language Barrier




‘Ciao bella!’ is one of the few phrases I remember from my study abroad experience last semester. Touring different European countries opens your eyes to the vast amount of cultures, languages and immense history throughout the world. One of my most striking revelations was the ease with which most Europeans spoke multiple languages. While walking through markets the vendors would try to guess your nationality by yelling different greetings in various languages. Being blonde with blue eyes I most often greeted with English, however on the rare occasion they thought I was Russian or German I would swell with pride because I was finally not sticking out as an obvious tourist! This experience left me with the overwhelming desire to work on my ability to speak Italian and the regret that I hadn’t begun learning a language from a younger age. In the recent neuroscience lecture given by Valerie Flores, a doctoral candidate at Loyola University Chicago, I realized that having the ability to speak multiple languages has advantages beyond cultural emersion.


Ms. Flores’ research investigated the cognitive functions and abilities of people who were language “brokers”. She defined this as people whom continuously and effectively switch or translate between two languages. Language brokers are found to have better performance on tasks associated with metalinguistic awareness, or the ability to contemplate and manipulate the meaning and configuration of language. Furthermore, there was an increase in their executive functioning ability, which includes skills such as multi-tasking, sustained attention, and inhibitory control. Through tests such as the Color-Word Stroop Task, where participants were asked to identify the color of the word not the word presented and then measured response times, she was able to show that language brokers had a quicker response time and were able to shift attention to accurately respond to the questions asked.
In the New York Times article titled “Why Bilinguals are Smarter”, author Yudhijit Bhattachargee discussed this phenomenon further. The article began by explaining that the previously held hypothesis that bilingualism “was an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development” was incorrect (Bhattachargee, pg. 1). The article went on to highlight many of the same advantages of being bilingual touched upon during Ms. Flores’ speech. One of the most intriguing advantages is that, on average, bilingual people were more resistant to symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and the degree to which a person is bilingual was correlated to later onset of symptoms. Bilingual people not only showed an increased ability to perform tasks associated with effective functioning but they did this with lower activation in parts of the brain associated with these tasks. So not only do they have higher ability but also a greater efficiency. The article explained that bilinguals might have these higher cognitive abilities because they have a “heighted ability to monitor the environment” (Bhattachargee, pg. 1). Switching from language to language requires a person to monitor slight changes in their environment and with practice would result in an increased ability to focus and other executive function abilities.
Language is an invaluable human ability as it is a means of communication that allows people to forge friendships, fall in love, insight great change and revolutions. Bilingualism allows people to do these things across cultures and bridge gaps to ease understanding of others. I like to believe that I’m well aware of the powers of language however; I had no idea that languages were as profoundly advantageous as actually shaping and increasing brain functioning!




No comments:

Post a Comment