First language influences brain for later language-learning | Hacker News Reader

First language influences brain for later language-learning

mcgill.ca

64 pointsDrScump23 comments

Terrible headline.

They found that Chinese children who were adopted into French-speaking families processed language in the brain more like Chinese/French bilingual children than like French monolingual children.

Thank you very much for this summary. Terrible science reporting is really getting out of hand recently. "Chomsky was right, we have a grammar in our head", what non-sense is that?! I blame this partly on TED which effectively promotes the misrepresentation of research to increase main stream appeal. Nowadays, science needs to be sexy and I see more and more research that appears to be designed to "go viral" on Twitter and Facebook.

I would say that it's university PR departments, but I suspect that often enough researchers are complicit as well.

The researchers hype up their research to university pr copywriters who don't understand it at all, then a journalist who may or may not understand it rewrites it into a story, and then some editor slaps a clickbaity headline on it. And who knows what bearing the actual study has on any of that.

And it's hard to disentangle the nonsense along the way. Like, I wrote "processes language in the brain" when it would have been more accurate to say "processes French pseudo-words".

Additionally, apart from Pimsleur, language courses are structured very differently from how one first learns to speak.

I think Michel Thomas' courses are vastly different from every other method, too, including Pimsleur. No reading/writing, only verbal communication... it's awesome.

Pimsleur is a child of it's age; a so-called audio-lingual method that has its roots in Skinnerian behaviorism. I think no language acquisition researcher takes it seriously any more. Check This out for a modern viewpoint: https://youtu.be/X1LRoKQzb9U

I see what you mean, but I've learned several languages using Pimsleur and native speakers are almost always shocked at how well I can speak their language.

That's still n=1. It might just be that you're particularly good at language acquisition, and you'll succeed no matter what method you use.

Or just particularly receptive to the method: X is the best method for me to learn a language is a very different proposition than X is the best method for people in general to learn a language.

> Or just particularly receptive to the method

If this is true, then my anecdotal experience is still evidence against this:

> I think no language acquisition researcher takes it seriously any more

Actually, "X works particularly well compared to other methods for one person" (even if demonstrated -- which your experience does not do, though it is one of many possible interpretations of that experience) is not evidence against "No language acquisition researcher takes X seriously".

you originally said

> X is the best method for me to learn a language

if this statement is true, then it is evidence that researchers should not dismiss it.

This:

> X works particularly well compared to other methods for one person

is not the same statement.

One can still reason when presented with an anecdote.

Get that into 80 chars or less and we'll use it.

2nd-lang learners process pseudo-words more like bilinguals than monolinguals.

Boom.

Hmm. The abbrev is cheating to get under the limit, and "pseudo-words" doesn't have any obvious meaning.

We replaced "wired" with "influenced" in the title above, which seems more moderate and within the scope of what the study found.

I wonder if the children who had forgotten their original first language would learn it again more easily than the children who had never learned the language at all.

That would be an interesting study.

That reminds me of some research I read a few years ago about savings habits for people speaking a language that has a time concept (passed, present, future) and languages that don't (chinese for example).

There was a pretty explicit separation on people having no time concepts saving more and putting more importance in the future, or something like that. It was pretty interesting to read how the way your language works shapes how your brain thinks and influences your habits.

edit: https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_aff... :)

I'd be curious to know what else this sort of thing shapes. Reminds me a bit of Ken Iverson's 'Notation as a Tool of Thought.' Programmers often talk about how learning different programming langauges improves their ability to conceptualize problems differently. I wonder if the same is true for spoken/written langauges?

Since there is other research indicating that bilingual children on average have a slightly higher IQ, most likely due to the brain being trained to compartmentalise information earlier, I wonder if that effect is notable in these former bilingual children too.

I thought those studies concerned more that the bi-lingual children had an extra flexibility at understanding a concept, rather than a more developed compartmentalization process.

You may be right, I said this from memory. Maybe we're talking about the same thing from a different perspective though? My recollection was that it had to do with the need to switch between languages.

I'd like to see this developed for relearning language after a stroke.

Have a friend whose first language was Spanish, but lived her life in the English speaking world and had limited Spanish skills as an adult After a serious stroke, she initially couldn't speak, but recovered ability in Spanish first. The court and language therapist marked down her communication skills because they were so English-centric. Caused a sad story.

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