Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages
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Assunto Corpo e MenteAtualizado em 8/8/2013 1:47:52 PM
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Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages
Lynch also believes - albeit based primarily on his own observations - that multilingual kids may exhibit social empathy sooner than children who grow up speaking only one language, which makes developmental sense. The theory of mind - understanding that whats in your head is not the same as whats in other peoples heads - does not emerge in children until theyre about 3 years old. Prior to that, they assume that if, say, they know a secret you probably do too. Theres a kind of primal narcissism in this - a belief that their worldview is the universal one. Once they learn thats not the case, self-centeredness falls away - at least a little - and the long process of true socialization begins. Theres nothing that accelerates the acquisition of that kind of other-awareness like the realization that even the very words you use to label the things in your world - dog, tree, banana - are not the same ones everyone uses.
Preliminary imaging work suggests that the roots of this behavior may even be visible in the brain. Some studies, for example, have shown a thickening of the cortex in two brain regions - most importantly the left inferior parietal, which helps code for language and gesturing. Bialystok is not entirely sold on these studies, since she would expect the greatest differences to be in the frontal lobes, where higher functions such as planning, decisionmaking and other aspects of whats known as executive control take place. Some of her own work has found an increase in white matter - the fatty sheathing that insulates nerves and improves their ability to communicate - in the frontal regions of bilinguals, suggesting denser signaling and complexity of functions in these areas. "Structural differences are where the new science is really unfolding," she says. "That work will reveal a lot."
Not every study out there finds benefits to bilingualism. Earlier this year, psychologists at Concordia University in Montreal studied 168 children ages 1 and 2 years old being raised by bilingual parents. In general, they found that the kids in the younger half of that cohort had smaller comprehension vocabularies - the number of words they appeared to understand - than kids being raised monolingual. The older half of the sample group had smaller production vocabularies - or words they could pronounce. This results, the researches believe, from parents mixing their languages when speaking to their kids, choosing the words they feel the children will have an easier time understanding or reproducing. That in turn leads to what linguists call code-switching - a commingling of tongues by the children that produces what Americans call Spanglish or Franglish when Spanish or French melded with English (this particular study produced more complex comminglings, since it included kids speaking German, Japanese and Farsi as well). However, Bialystok agrees that this is a short-term disadvantage of bilingualism, and says in most cases the kids catch up.
And when they do, language skills acquired early can pay late-life dividends. In one study, bilinguals experienced the onset of age-related dementia 4.1 years later than multilinguals, and full-blown Alzheimers 5.1 years later. "One school of thought says that any cognitive reserve - education, multilingualism, even playing Sudoku puzzles - strengthens the brain and helps it resist disease," says Bialystok. "The other says that the brains of multilinguals experience the same level of disease as those of monolinguals, but they cope with it better. They function at a higher level than they would otherwise be able to function."
In another 2013 study, this one from the University of Kentucky, bilingual and monolingual people in the 60- to 68-year-old age group underwent brain scans while performing a cognitive task that required them to switch back and forth among several different ideas. Both groups performed the task accurately, but bilinguals were faster as well as more metabolically economical in executing the cognitive mission, using less energy in the frontal cortex than the monolinguals.
The very fact that something as simple as working with puzzles or having once got a good education can improve brain function does prove that multilingualism is not the only path to staying cognitively healthy in your dotage. And plenty of monolinguals do perfectly well at acquiring empathy and social skills early in life. Still, there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world. There must be a reason our brains come factory-loaded to learn more than just one.
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Fonte: https://healthland.time.com/2013/04/23/bilingualism/
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