K. R. Callaway reports in the NY Times about some interesting new research:
Speak a language your whole life and its grammatical rules become ingrained. That’s why you might correctly guess that the present participle of the verb “absquatulate” is “absquatulating,” even if you are completely unfamiliar with the word. But the rules of grammar can vary widely between languages, and neuroscientists long theorized that bilingual speakers must process different languages with separate patterns of brain activity.
In a new study, however, researchers found that these patterns were more alike than had been expected. When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language. “It wasn’t obvious that it was going to be so shared,” said Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University and an author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal JNeurosci. “I think this is arguably one of the first very fine-grained findings of how truly integrated two languages in the brain are.”
Early research viewed bilingualism as an “add on” or “disruption” to the processing of one’s native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study. Subsequent studies have found that bilingual brains tend to display physical differences, such as more efficient white matter and changes to the gray matter, and to perform better on memory and concentration tasks.
Now scientists are probing further, to understand whether core aspects of the brain’s neural network does double or triple duty to process multiple languages.
For insight, Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta’s research team placed 23 bilingual Spanish and English speakers in a magnetoencephalography, or MEG, scanner and monitored their brain activity as they made words singular or plural. While lying in the scanner, the participants were shown the word to be modified, such as “boats” or “tuna.” Then they heard a command — “one” or “uno” to make the word singular; “two” or “dos” to make it plural; or “say” or “di” to simply repeat the word without modifying it. The scanner took millisecond-by-millisecond images of brain activity before, during and after each of these internal calculations.
The research team found that the patterns of brain activity were roughly the same whether bilingual participants looked at Spanish or English words. Critically, this was true even when words didn’t have a cognate in the other language — like “taxi,” which has the same meaning in Spanish and English. It even held for “pseudowords” that sounded like Spanish or English words — such as “ailos” — but had no real meaning.
“That makes it harder to explain the effect as simply reflecting shared vocabulary,” Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta said, “and suggests the brain may be representing the grammatical operation itself.”
Thanks, Eric and Bonnie!
I’m extremely sceptical about this. Brain scans have not yeilded meaningful results on much more important matters; this looks like a joke.
What @V said.
So on topic of Linguistic Universals, all we need do is bring up a kid in a carefully chosen polylinguistic environment (say a European mother, an African click-language father, a Mandarin-speaking nanny); wait a few years; then scan their brain to find the location of NOUN.
I too am highly sceptical of electric phrenology.
Leaving aside the whole general flakiness aspect, surely the first thing to determine is whether these alleged patterns are in fact shared between bilinguals and monolinguals; i.e. whether they are nothing to do with bilingualism at all.
It’s pointless to attempt rational criticism of this sort of gubbins, but I would also point out that in cross-linguistic terms, Spanish and English are actually extremely similar languages. Only someone with little understanding of linguistics would really expect enormous electrophrenological differences between them.
“How the brain implements abstract computations” (from the paper) is a giveaway of the mindset behind the “linguistics” here. Chomskyite thought pattern detected. (I expect it would show up as a highly distinctive trace in the thought-reading apparatus they are using.)
MEGs are fairly low resolution, perhaps a few cubic millimeters with thousands of cells each. The brain does a lot of things for each query that is similar for both languages, hearing the question and vocalizing a response plus what ever it thinks about the environment. The inability to detect which language in the MEG data does not prove there is no difference in brain mechanisms. The “ patterns were more alike than had been expected” probably means the expectations were inappropriate.
David Eddyshaw : “Chomskyite thought pattern detected” : Can I borrow that phrase? Maybe in a robotic voice? Pretty Please?
Yeah, Spanish/English seems so obviously like the wrong combo to start with, unless perhaps they were hoping to find dramatic phrenological *differences* before they gathered the data but decided to publish anyway after falsifying their starting hypothesis. If you don’t want to travel to e.g. Paraguay to test Spanish/Guarani bilinguals, the U.S. has at hand substantial populations of people bilingual in English and your choice of “Chinese(s)”/Vietnamese/Arabic/Korean, to pick probably the largest four non-IE options. Someone could even work through in advance which of those has a grammar suggesting neurological processes (Chomskyite or otherwise) most different from those associated with English.
Spanish and English are actually extremely similar languages. Only someone with little understanding of linguistics would really expect enormous electrophrenological differences between them.
They weren’t looking for differences between the languages. They were looking at how the languages are packed (If I can use that word) into the brain. According to the reporter, people expected that two languages couldn’t share brain space, but the study claims to show instead that the languages are “integrated” (not “similar”) in the brain. Maybe, as david said, the method wasn’t fine-enough-grained to really show that, and I agree with you and J.W.B. that repeating the study with languages that differ more in their handling of plurals would be an improvement, [Edit: though you may not think an improvement would be worthwhile]. (And I hope they did some words with unusual plurals, such as “deer”, “crisis”, and the only one I know of in Spanish, “carácter”.)
More on the the authors’ view of the study and possibly exaggerated claims at the NYU press release.
@J.W.B.: The first author is Xuanyi Jessica Chen. I feel sure she knows where to find Chinese-English bilingual speakers in New York, and I suspect that it was still significantly more practical to find 23 Spanish-English volunteers.
Jerry Friedman, what plural of “carácter” are you referencing?
Wiktionary says the plural can be “caracteres” as well as “carácteres”. I’d thought “caracteres” was the only plural. [Edited.]
Further edit: I see the DLE says nothing explicit about the plural, but the only plural in its examples is written without an accent (caracteres elzevirianos, for the sense of style of written symbols).
I should have mentioned that the Spanish word “crisis” is unchanged in the plural, which is regular for words that end in unaccented -is.
As others have hinted at, using Spanish and English to measure if bilingual speakers use two separate pathways for pluralization is pretty stupid. A person could easily have one mental rule for both, then paper over the few differences on an ad-hoc basis. Did they expect bilingual English and Spanish speakers to replicate “just put an s on it” in two different parts of their brains?
I think it would work much better if they asked people to fill in a hole in a sentence with a verb. Which tense, aspect, and mood to use would not follow the same logic in both languages, unlike grammatical number, which operates in the same way with the same forms. If you can show that verb conjugation is integrated, that would be more meaningful than showing that English and Spanish speakers have figured out that they don’t have the memorize the same rule twice.
@Madeline Kalvis: The paper is open-access (assuming I didn’t somehow get automatic access via my employer’s library). It says some people did expect English and Spanish speakers to have their plural rules in different parts of their brains.
I agree that to support their far-reaching comments, English and Spanish verbs would have been a better choice.
The researchers say that they chose to look at English and Spanish noun plurals because of their similarity.
Yeah, I’m sure the study isn’t perfect, but some folks seem to have decided ex ante (as the lawyers among us say) that it’s bullshit and gone to town on it without actually engaging with it.
So they’ve falsified the Shallow Structure Hypothesis? Assuming n=23 is enough data, etc. etc.
It’s a wonderful study, in my opinion, because it demonstrates pretty convincingly that the same cortical resources are recruited for certain grammatical operations in speech production, both within and across the bilingual subjects. I’d also be interested in knowing whether, as David Eddyshaw asks, that conclusion obtains over monolinguals.
If “languages can’t share space in the brain”, then yes, this logically follows; so this is an actual hypothesis that they actually disproved, unsurprising as it is.
What I can’t look up right now but would find interesting is whether the “bilinguals” are native bilinguals, adult learners, or something in between, or all of these. That could, or could not, Change Everything.
@J.W.B.: So they’ve falsified the Shallow Structure Hypothesis? Assuming n=23 is enough data, etc. etc.
If you make all the assumptions, yes, but one of them is that their MEG equipment provides sufficient resolution, and david raised the possibility that there could be separate processing areas on scales too small for MEG to see. I certainly don’t know.
@David M.: What I can’t look up right now but would find interesting is whether the “bilinguals” are native bilinguals, adult learners, or something in between, or all of these.
Sorry, I didn’t manage the subscripts, but AoA_Spanish is a subscript on the M, and likewise for the age of acquisition of English.
Ah, so they’re probably all native bilinguals or nearly so and are less likely to have ~ consciously interpreted the grammar of their L2 in terms of their L1, which I figure would mean reusing the same parts of the brain. That’s good.
“Did they expect bilingual English and Spanish speakers to replicate “just put an s on it” in two different parts of their brains?”
David M: If “languages can’t share space in the brain”, then yes, this logically follows; so this is an actual hypothesis that they actually disproved, unsurprising as it is.
Ah. I forgot how much time academics have to spend proving that 2+2 does not equal 3, and then 5, and then 17.2… How irritating and tedious. But I see now why they did what they did.