Science Friday - Speaking Multiple Languages Changes The Way You Think

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Have you ever wondered how the language you speak shapes your understanding of the world around you? And if you speak two or more languages, how might that change the way you process information? Is your brain always thinking in multiple languages or are you toggling back and forth?In many parts of the world, multilingualism is the norm. And in the United States, the number of people who speak a language other than English has doubled in the past two decades, from just about 11% to about 22%.Dr. Viorica Marian has spent her career studying multilingual and bilingual people to better understand how their brains process information differently than their monolingual counterparts.Ira talks with Dr. Viorica Marian, professor of communication sciences and disorders and psychology at Northwestern University, and author of the book The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform our Minds in front of a live audience at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, Illinois, presented with WBEZ and Mindworks. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Think about your brain as a kind of super processor, constantly running parallel operations at very high speed. Now, what if you're multilingual? In people who speak multiple languages, there's a lot more interactivity and activation happening all the time. It's Thursday, December 7th. But you don't have to wait until tomorrow, because today is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski, Dr. Villarika Marion, is a professor of communication sciences and disorders at Northwestern University. and she's author of The Power of Language, how the codes we use to think, speak, and live

transform our minds. Here she is talking with Ira Flato on stage in Chicago. It was part of an event at the Studio Baker Theater presented with WBEZ and MindWorks. Let's listen in. Dr. Marianne, let's talk about multiple languages. Did you get interested in that because you are multilingual? How did you get interested in studying this?

That was certainly part of it. So I grew up in Eastern Europe. We spoke Romanian at home with my family, and then outside the home, Russian was the official language everywhere on the territory of the former Soviet Union. And then I studied English in school and then French in college. And this is actually very typical for many people in Europe and not just in Europe. In fact, the majority of the world population, more than half of the world's population, is bilingual or multilingual.

It is very common for people all over the world on every content, to grow up with two or more languages from early childhood and then learn additional languages later in life. But then when I would go to a library or bookstore or in my coursework in college, most research, most science that I read, centered on people who only spoke one language. So it very early became clear to me

that by leaving out this huge segment of the population, we are getting not only an incomplete, but also an inaccurate understanding of how language works, how the mind works, of human nature and humanist potential more broadly. This is what brought me to studying the interaction between language and mind with a particular focus on people who speak multiple languages.

And here in the United States, we speak mostly one language. So we're in the minority of countries in the world because we're just speaking one language. one language? That's true, but the numbers, the demographics are changing. A little over one-fifth of American households speak a language other than English at home, and the proportion of people who are studying another language, especially now with all the apps that are available, is increasing. Let's look about, look on the statistics of people who speak more than one language.

How is your brain processing language differently from people who speak only one language? Are you constantly switching back and forth between languages? Oh, that's a really good question because we used to think that we're switching back and forth between the two languages. In fact, people would think that when you use a language, you turn it on, you are done with it, you switch it off, switch the other on, on, and switch between the two languages. But now we know that that's not the case, that people who know two more languages keep all of them active in their mind to some extent.

And we see an image here. So, for example, if you speak English and you read just three letters, P-O-T, your mind immediately activates multiple meanings of this word. Perhaps it's the utensil you cook with or a pot that you plant or some of bits or maybe some other plants you've had familiarity with. But if you speak Russian, that's how you spell the word mouth. and that's also how you pronounce the word sweat. And then if you speak Romanian,

that's how you say I can or we can. So in English, you activate the meaning, these four meanings, for example, Pips, more, and then from there, other related word forms and word meanings are activated. But if you speak two with three languages, this activation spreads across multiple languages

simultaneously. So you can think about it, if you were to throw a, pebble in the water, you see this waves around. The further out you go, the bigger, the circle becomes and the closer to the pebble, you are the stronger the activation. So when people who speak toomo languages, all these languages are being activated.

So we're thinking in parallel. It's like parallel processing. That's right. Our brain is this parallel processing superorganism that processes information in parallel at all time. So in people who speak multiple languages, there's a lot more interactively. and activation happening all the time.

That is cool. That is really cool. I know you developed this clever way of determining if a bilingual or multilinguals are processing two languages at once using an eye tracking device. Yes. So we use multiple methods in the lab. We use eye tracking, EEG, FMRI. But with eye tracking specifically, we track people's eye movements as they perform different tasks.

So you may be sitting in front of a desk and you may be asked to pick up a a marker, for example. If you speak English and we ask you to pick up a marker, you will also make eye movements to marbles, because marker and marbles sound similar. So this shows us that in your mind, both words are being processed and co-activated. But if you speak Russian, in addition to marbles, you will actually make eye movements to a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marca. That's exactly what we do. We have people wear this eye cap, this eye-trakow on a and we record the eye movements as they do all sorts of tasks. And by measuring their eye movements, we make inferences about their mental processes.

There's this very sort of seductive idea that multiple languages allows you to see the world in a different perspective. Is that true? Yeah, so there is some evidence for that. We think that there is this objective reality that we live in. But in essence, the reality that I live in is. is different from the reality that you live in or others live in because our perception of reality is shaped by our previous experiences. And language, linguistic experience is one of those experiences that shapes how we perceive the world.

So I'll give you an example, the rainbow. We all think, if we speak English, that it has this set number of colors. But in reality, the rainbow doesn't have this specific colors that we all draw when we are children. There is an infinite number of colors, the entire color spectrum that's present in the rainbow. Each color sort of switching one pixel at a time

into another color. So there's an infinite number of colors. But the languages that we speak impose this color boundaries on how we think about the rainbow. And people who have other words for color in languages where there are more or fewer languages for colors, think about the rainbow differently.

And not only that, but I noticed in trying to learn other languages, inanimate objects have different genders to them. Some are male, some are female. Does that also influence? Oh, that's a good question too. So for those who only speak English, in English, all inanimate objects are referred to as it. But in many other languages,

and in many of the objects, like a cup or a bottle, is referred to as either she or he. And it sounds like a stress. but speakers of romance languages, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, for example, they very easily from an early age just learn what's a he and what's a she. And other languages may have more, like Russian has an it, a neutral gender. And it turns out that grammatical gender influences how people represent mentally those subjects.

So in an experiment done by, an experiment is done by Lara Boroditsky at, um, you know, a, um, you Stanford and then you see San Diego, she asked Spanish-German bilingual to describe, people who spoke Spanish and people who spoke German, to describe bridges or keys. And depending on the grammatical gender of the object and the language that you spoke,

you describe them very differently. So if key was masculine in your native language, you tended to describe it as jagged and metal and sturdy and useful. And then if it was feminine, you tended to describe it as delicate, small, just really mentally representing things differently. You write in your book that in older adults being multilingual

actually delays Alzheimer's for, is there evidence? There's evidence for that. I mean, and you're saying four to six years. Yes, this is one of the most exciting findings, I think, with real-world implications that comes from studying people who speak to more languages. It turns out that constantly using two more languages offers protective, has this protective advantage against some of the cognitive declines

that often accompany aging and that always accompany dementia. So if you speak two or more languages, you are likely to show symptoms of dementia four to six years later than people who speak only one language. you have formed these connections between words, meanings, memories, life experiences that allow you to compensate functionally for the anatomical deterioration that your brain experiences. So for those of you who are past school age, it's never too late, and it might actually be fun to learn another language.

All right. Speaking of fun, I have some of your questions here. And let's see what, okay, here's, Ago writes, I realize when I speak English, I am more proactive than when we're, when I speak Japanese. When my wife speaks Spanish, she is more social and chatty than when she speaks in English. Tell me about it. That's consistent with what people are finding

in research studies, as I was saying before, the language that we speak brings to the forefront different aspects of our personalities and different cultural norms. So what is appropriate in the Japanese culture versus what's appropriate in the American culture is going to be activated and influenced by the language as we speak. One of my colleagues, who is a Japanese, English bilingual as well,

says that she actually bows when she speaks on the phone when she speaks in Japanese versus when she speaks in English because her language just activates the social norms. So the experiences that this person is describing consistent with findings on personality tests, In fact, bilingual score differently depending on the language they're taking them in. Let's go to Jeff S. Is Jeff want to take a chance and ask a question, which is a good one?

I had a question about unspoken languages like computer languages. If someone is fluent in other languages that they don't speak, could you also get some of the same benefits of bilingualism or multilingualism, for example, stalling dementia onset? Could you, learning computer languages? Yeah, so it seems that you can see some of the executive function consequences with artificial languages. We don't know yet about dementia and Alzheimer's,

but executive function differences, yes. So other symbolic systems that rely on math, like computer languages, do also change the way our brain works. Why do kids pick up multiple languages so much faster than adults? Yeah, so when we are born, we can hear these and distinguish between the sounds of all of the world's languages. Just like with the rainbow, remember I was saying, there's an infinite number of colors. There is an infinite number of sounds that we could perceive when we are first born. We are sort of citizens of the world.

But by our first birthday, our brains get tuned in to the sounds of our own language, and we've become citizens of one country or one language, or perhaps more than one language. In babies who are exposed to more than one language, this perceptual window is open for a little bit longer. There are multiple reasons why children learn languages easier. There is a constant linguistic input for them. Their brains are also still developing.

They are much more plastic. So it's not just language. There are other things that our brains just pick up easier when they're younger and plastic. But we actually now know that you can learn another language and you can learn it to fluency at any age. We used to think that there is this critical age period after which you cannot learn another language to fluency.

That's actually not the case. So your brain can learn another language at any age. And it may be more difficult because you, You are doing so many more things in your daily life. You're not just having care. I mean, if you lived the life of a child and someone took care of you and spoke with you in this hi-baby contour speech, you would learn differently than if you were thinking about a million other things that you have on your mind. Last question from Rebecca.

How does multilingualism support the brain's capacity to form emotion concepts and express emotions? Is there a connection? Does it influence it? Yes, so this goes back to how much of our thought and emotion and our life experiences are tied to language. And quite a bit, actually. So that's why when you are in therapy or when you're growing up, you're often told to, you know, label your emotion. Sometimes labeling your emotion helps you process it. So there are, languages vary in the kind of words that they have for emotion. So people express emotion and report feeling differently depending on the labels that they have for emotion.

So yes, emotions, emotions are tied to language and can help us process our experiences different. By labeling them, we understand or we process our feelings. feelings differently. Like I mentioned before, there is now research on psychotherapy with bilinguals, also showing that you can distance yourself from feelings by switching to a different language than the language in which a traumatic experience happened, or you can experience closeness differently in your interpersonal relationships. People report feeling differently when they're being told, I love you, in their native language versus in their non-native language. So language has this very powerful effect in how we connect with others.

If we spoke a certain language with our family, we may associate it with warmth or the opposite. It depends on the kind of experiences we've had. Yeah. That's terrific. Vioreka, we've run out of time. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Villarica Marianne, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders in Psychology at Northwestern University and director of the bilingualism and psycholinguistics research group based in Evanston, Illinois.

Thank you for coming down. That's it for today's show. If you're interested in our live events, you can find out more at ScienceFriiday.com slash events. Maybe we'll see you in person soon. Coming up on our next show, we're going to wrap up this week's science news with Rachel Feldman from Popular Science. I'm John Dankoski. We'll talk to you soon.