Just last month, I began learning Spanish for the first time. Bilingual individuals have always fascinated me and becoming one of them later in life has always been a goal of mine. That being said, I saw writing this blog post as a opportunity to better educate myself and all of the lovely people on Brain Points about the Neuroscience of Bilingualism.
Earlier this semester, I attended a guest lecture with Professor Elizabeth Wakefield. In it, she presented mostly on bilingualism relating to learning from hand gestures. The lecture mainly summarized "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism," an article co-written by Wakefield (Zielinski and Wakefield, 2021). The study follows Polish/English learning children who are listening to a story from a gesturing presenter. Most of the children's stronger language is English, with their weaker language being Polish. Eye tracking data was used alongside a post test questionnaire to assess comprehension and attention to the story. Results indicated that the subjects had better recall for story beats told with hand gestures in polish over hand gestures in English. In other words, hand gestures saw greater functionality for comprehension in weaker language trials over stronger language trials. Furthermore, these gestures were most effective when they didn't add additional content to the meaning of the spoken words (ie. when they were mismatched). Although informative, the lecture left me with one big question: Can data found on Polish-American youth be generalized to bilingualism in the wider world?
To answer this question, I read "Redefining bilingualism as a spectrum of experiences that differential affects brain structure and function," a piece that emphasizes the differences in bilingualism between differing language combinations and cultures (DeLuca, 2019). Such intricacies indicate that bilingualism shouldn't necessarily be thought of as a binary operationalized variable. Factors like when an individual learned the 2nd language, the environment in which the individual most frequently uses the 2nd language, and the extent and proficiency of 2nd language use vary wildly between bilingual individuals. Accordingly, there is a physiological difference in brain structure between bilingual individuals depending on the distribution and prevalence of these 3 aspects throughout one's lifetime. This complexity is backed by variability in grey matter density and location in language processing brain structures between bilingual individuals. Armed with this knowledge, I am now more skeptical in whether Wakefield's findings with bilingual youth can be generalized to all individuals wishing to learn a 2nd language for themselves. It seems that gesture learning for Polish-American youth is beneficial, but further research must be done to conclude whether similar results can be seen in adolescents or older adults learning a second language at later stages of development.
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 43, No. 43).
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