Surely you have seen bilingual person tries his best to remember a word in his native language, and you thought he was doing this to show his abilities. If you don’t believe me, that person is you. But the truth is, whether you are or not, this person has reasons to be confused. And that’s what bilingual or multilingual brain they tend to mask the language they are more accustomed to.
It really makes sense. When bilingual people think of a word, their brain translates it into all the languages they speak. That is, if someone who speaks English and French wants to talk about home, his brain is activated by both languages. How to say “house” and pronounce “maison”. But it will only be said in one language, so the other is inhibited. This inhibition sometimes fails, causing people who speak many languages to sometimes get confused. But, above all, the native is inhibited, because, speaking it from birth and with great ease, he would prevail over others.
This is one of the conclusions of the investigation carried out by the group Matthieu Declercfrom the Free University of Brussels and described in a journal article BBC in 2022. Through several experiments conducted with bilingual and multilingual people, this scientist, speaking and Dutch, and English, and French, analyzed how the brain works when processing so many languages. But his team is not the only one to conduct such an investigation.
Bilinguals bully their mother tongue
Declreck’s team has done several experiments with bilinguals who speak different languages. One of them, very common in this area of neuroscience, is to display them on a computer screen. color sequence in both languages what they say. When they read them in the required language, they brain activityto check which regions are working the most in the process. Thus, it can be seen that they use not only the regions associated with the language. Also those who handle attention. And if at some point the activity in them decreases, they can get confused, generally against their own native language. It’s because it’s a lot more retarded.
Another team led Tamar Golanfrom the University of California at San Diego conducted a study involving carriers Spanish and Englishwho had to read texts in only one of the languages or mixed. Thus, it has been observed that in mixed texts, in some cases, they tend to confuse words, although they read them written in another language. And again, they are used to getting confused about what is not their native language.
The same goes for the accent. Sometimes they missed not a word, but the accent with which it was read. But that is not all. In another study involving monolingual or bilingual Italians who also spoke English, it was observed that when they read a text in Italian, despite the fact that it is the mother tongue for everyone, their brains process it differently.
Benefits of Bilingualism in the Brain
In 2015, Albert Costa and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, researchers from Pompeu Fabra Universityfrom Barcelona, conducted a study aimed at analyzing the brains of bilingual people, both when learning two languages from a young age, and when mastering a second language in adulthood.
Like the Dutch team, they found differences in the brains of bilingual and monolingual people. Again, they found that learning a second language changes the perception of the first. But they also saw that executive functions brain. These are the abilities that allow us to consciously control thoughts, emotions and actions to achieve goals. So the brain itself malleableadapts to control or suppress languages as needed.
While more research will be needed to confirm this, these Spanish scientists believe that this increase in brain processing requirements could improve The cognitive reserve of the elderly.
It is clear that knowledge of a second language is always useful. In fact, it has been observed that certain specific languages can affect stroke recovery. Bilingualism is more than beneficial. So the next time we make fun of someone for not remembering a word of their native language, we better remember that they are not faking and that their confusion is proof that their brain is in top shape. . At least when it comes to languages.
Source: Hiper Textual
