My father spoke Russian at least until he arrived in the Adirondack region of New York State when he was 10 years old. As far as I know, he never spoke it again, deciding to cast aside the language of all those unhappy years of pogroms and brutal Cossacks and his missing father. My mother’s father spoke Russian as a child and made a similar decision never to speak it again after leaving “the old country.” English would be the language of their future happiness in this welcoming land of opportunity, America. I remember, as a child, being interested in Russia. I wanted to learn some of the language. However, neither my father nor grandfather would say a Russian word. It was not only that they hated the memories of being a reviled minority in that land. In those years, learning two or more languages at any early age was thought to be a disadvantage causing delay in learning to speak and leading to a limited vocabulary in all the languages. After all, the brain had to have some kind of storage capacity and it made sense to fill it up with the language that really mattered, English. This point of view will have to change based on what recent scientific evidence demonstrates.
It’s not surprising that Canadian scientists would want to look into the multlingual question, considering the political turmoil in that country about the conflict between French and English speaking Canada. Ellen Bialystok, professor of psychology at York University in Ontario, who just won the Killam Prize, pointed out in her Introduction to the highly regarded 1991 book, “Language Processing in Bilingual Children”, that in the 1960s the general wisdom was that bilingualism was a disorder that should be corrected by “pushing out from the inflicted child all traces of the invading language.” Scientific work, in which Professor Bialystok has played a leading role, shows that multilingualism yields an advantage to the child, the precise opposite of the old prevailing view. An overview of the research leading to this insight was published in the October 15, 2010 issue of Science on page 332. The article summarizes not only the work from York University but also that of other researchers, which support the value of being exposed to and using multiple languages, life long.
The value of multilingualism comes with more a feeling of “of course” than surprise, because we know very well from all kinds of research how “plastic” the brain is and how it has an expandable capacity. As described in a blog published a few years ago in sciencefromaway.com “Science from Away: Memory,” this plasticity of the brain is effectively demonstrated by changes in the gray matter of the brains of London taxi drivers who had to learn all about the tangle of streets within six miles of Charing Cross. Learning therefore that infants in their cribs who are bilingual find it easier than do monolingual infants to follow either visual or verbal signals to follow changing directions to look at a puppet, made sense. The brains of the infants exposed to two languages were already profiting from the extra brain capacity necessary to change language input even before they spoke. That work came from scientists in Trieste, Italy. Similar conclusions were reached in beautifully designed experiments by Professor Bialystok, who hypothesizes that the advantage of multilingualism arises from an enhanced function of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The function allows us to discriminate between a variety of incoming information sources – what is known to researchers as the “executive function” of the mind.
Finally, in a finding arising from this area of research and of much interest to those of us advancing in years, the onset of dementia, including Alzheimer’s symptoms, was discovered by Professor Bialystok to be significantly delayed in multilingual persons compared to those speaking one language. Apparently, although the physical changes in the brain may begin at the same time for people speaking one or more languages, multilingualism apparently yields a greater capacity of the brain to resist the consequent dementia. Much however is still not understood. Do the advantages scale with the number of languages one uses? Will learning a second or more languages later in life allow one to catch up with infants exposed to more than one language who then speak these languages throughout their lives? Scientists are at work to try to answer these questions – stay tuned, à suivre, quédate con nosotros, oставайтесь с нами,
لا تنزعج , 耐心等待 , השארו , bleiben sie dran.
http://www.sciencefromaway.com
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