Don’t Overthink It: Could Higher Executive Functions Inhibit Foreign Language Ability?

It is well known that children are much better at learning languages than adults. After all, it is exceedingly rare for one to master a language to the extent of one’s native one, thinking and dreaming in one learned later in life. Nelson Mandela famously said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

One paper sought to compile research on this very topic, finding many interesting details about bilingualism and brain development (Berken et al., 2017). One such finding is that the first few months are crucial in phoneme (the sounds of a language) acquisition, and that the speaking of various sounds and babbles in a tongue that will grow to be indistinguishable to that of a native speaker solidify as early as one year of age.

The exact reason that humans lose this ability to take on a new language like our native one is unknown, and there are many possible explanations. One may be simple necessity and opportunity, that as infants we both require learning the language around us to communicate basic needs and have little else to do or devote brain power towards. A common theory is that young children’s minds are especially malleable, and that the increased neuroplasticity that comes with youth is why learning languages becomes increasingly difficult as one ages.

A recent study, however, hints at an entirely different conclusion. The University of Liverpool conducted a study that focused on the language ability of non-native speakers, comparing sober participants to those who consumed a low-dose of alcohol (Renner et al., 2017). Surprisingly, despite controlling for a placebo effect and finding no change in self-reported language ability, native speakers of the language in question blindly tended to rate those in the alcohol consuming group with significantly higher conversational scores!

This surely came as a surprise. Alcohol is well-known for inhibiting what are known as ‘executive functions’, things such as memory, attention, comprehension, alertness, and pronunciation. This is why we picture a forgetful, sleepy, inattentive, slurring person when we imagine somebody who has had a lot to drink. While the study was notably a small amount of alcohol- comparable to a pint of beer for an average man- it seems counterintuitive that even slight inhibition of the previously mentioned functions would result in better performance in speaking a foreign language. Many of the things we consider ‘executive functions’ are things we consider key to speaking a learned language. What could be the cause of this finding?

The study admittedly offers that the anxiety suppressing effects of alcohol could be the source of the findings. A small amount of alcohol tends to make most people more social and less nervous, which could have resulted in more casual and natural language. While this is likely partially to blame for the findings, I suggest something else. That the suppression of these executive functions is precisely what allows for better language abilities rather than being a side-effect that is overcome by alcohol’s more social effects.

While it’s true that memory recall and pattern recognition are what comes to mind when we think about a foreign language, it’s important to recognize that it may not be that way for an infant- those most adept at learning languages of all humans (broadly). An infant is not an acute pattern recognizing and alert genius; they wield a still developing brain that even at its best is much less intelligent than a heavily intoxicated adult. The mentioned study implies that partially inhibiting these executive functions allows the human mind to take a step closer to its natural language-learning state; more of a blank canvas than refined machinery.

It’s hard to say what this could mean for the future of language education and instruction if these findings are supported, particularly if the anxiety reducing effects of alcohol can be controlled for. Should students in high-school Spanish take a shot of vodka before their lesson? No, probably not. But it is worth exploring the fact that the logical, pattern based method with which we teach and learn languages is very different from how an infant naturally learns, and that a more immersive, less analytical method may lead to better and faster results. Maybe it’s time we started learning with our hearts instead of our heads. But maybe it also means that shotgunning a White Claw before your next foreign language final isn’t as bad of an idea as it might seem.

References

Berken, J. A., Gracco, V. L., & Klein, D. (2017). Early bilingualism, language attainment, and brain development. Neuropsychologia, 98, 220-227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.031

Renner, F., Kersbergen, I., Field, M., & Werthmann, J. (2017). Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(1), 116-122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881117735687

BCI using RNN and ECoG devises to Produce Sounds Related to the Computational Simulation of the Human Auditory Pathway in Understanding Phonetic Acquisition

The auditory system is a complex and fragile network of structures working together to perceive, process, and encode sound. Deciphering different phonetic sounds and classifying those units has been an effort many researchers have worked on. However, Dr. Dematties in the research article “Phonetic acquisition in cortical dynamics, a computational approach” examines how linguistic units like phonemes are encoded and classified to form complex acoustic streams in speech data. Additionally, infants can differentiate sounds of words from a complex audio stream through recognizing patterns in speech. The research is accomplished through creating 500 words with different sounds and lengths, CSTM, which stimulates cortical tissues to mimic the respected sounds. They use multiple processes that stimulate the growth of the distal dendritic branch synapsis, thus, allowing for synapses to only be created on pyramidal cells and biases the process of activation in each respective neuron. This approach allows the researcher to control variations in levels of reverberation, noise, and pitch. Furthermore, multiple algorithms are used to activate auditory neurons in order to create the correct phonemes, words, and sounds that can be encoded. The research concludes that through the use of computational simulation, the neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data of the human auditory pathway is able to mimic incidental phonetic acquisition observed in human infants, which is a key mechanism involved during early language learning. The authors propose that these algorithms can be used in creating more efficient and complex AI speech generators and programs that recognize or translate speech. 

Through the utilization of new technology and AI algorithms such as the ones Dematties produced, Neurologist can create brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for mute people that translate neurological and cortical language signals into electro-stimulation produced synthetic speech. Dematties work could accompany this research to achieve the same results in deaf patients as well. To achieve this, Anumanchipalli et al used an approach that used a two-stage decoding approach. Neural signals are translated into representations of movements of vocal-tract articulators into spoken sentences through the use of recurrent neural networks (RNN) and an electrocorticography (ECoG) device. Using a two-stage approach resulted in less acoustic distortion than using direct decoding of acoustic features. The authors argue that “If massive data sets spanning a wide variety of speech conditions were available, direct synthesis would probably match or outperform a two-stage decoding approach” (Pandarinath et al. 2019). Due to the creation of these algorithms by Dematties, direct synthesis is a greater possibility with the utilization of AI in speech and auditory processing. 

Furthermore, due to the development of BCIs, through the use of AI and computational analytical algorithms, new forms of utilization of this technology have been considered for the control of arm and hand movements and in humans with paralysis. Trials have successfully demonstrated that the rapid communication, control of robotic arms, and restoration of sensation and movement of paralyzed limbs in humans using these BCIs is possible.

References

Dematties D, Rizzi S, Thiruvathukal GK, Wainselboim A, Zanutto BS (2019) Phonetic acquisition in cortical dynamics, a computational approach. PLoS ONE 14(6): e02117966. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217966 

Anumanchipalli, G.K., Chartier, J. & Chang, E.F. “Speech synthesis from neural decoding of spoken sentences”. Nature 568, 493–498 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1119-1