![]() ![]() I was really interested in looking at what happens in the brain when bilingual people switch languages as they compose words together. ![]() So in specific social contexts, bilingual people have to further develop their working memory and attention skills to prevent switching to the language that the monolingual speaker would not understand. In one hypothesis, the adaptive control hypothesis, the bilingual individual has to work really, really hard to make this conscious effort to suppress a language to communicate effectively with one monolingual person versus another fellow bilingual person.Ĭurrent ideas about the bilingual brain suggest that both languages are always accessible, even when the bilingual person is speaking with a monolingual person. Let’s say, as a Spanish-English bilingual person, you’re in conversation with someone who only speaks English or Spanish. What’s actually hard is when you’re in a situation where you have to stick with just one language. Well, that is actually the easiest mode of conversation for them both because they can use whatever words work in whatever ways they want to put those words together to convey thoughts and ideas that they have, right? Let’s say you have a Spanish-English bilingual person talking to another Spanish-English bilingual person. One recent idea about improved cognitive functioning, which comes from work by researchers such as Judith Kroll at the University of California, Irvine, is that social aspects of language switching-such as deciding when and how you switch-could help explain potential benefits. These kinds of tasks are not necessarily linguistic in function they tap into other things that we typically use on a day-to-day basis, such as attention and working memory.Ĭould code switching relate to possible memory and attention benefits? This comes out of work done by Ellen Bialystok at York University, who saw that bilingual speakers were faster at doing cognitively demanding tasks, such as a psychological test where you have to inhibit some information to be able to successfully complete an assignment. The claim-and there’s debate around it that makes it kind of a hot topic-is that bilingual people exhibit some kind of cognitive advantage, compared with their monolingual peers. Rather than deficits, some researchers have argued that there is a “bilingual advantage.” Can you explain that idea? Those single-language models, potentially, could cause people who are bilingual to be misdiagnosed with processing deficits just because they’re doing something that doesn’t fit what monolingual people typically do. We need to have a better understanding of what typical bilingual behavior and brain processes look like rather than relying on monolingual models of how languages are processed in the brain. We should have models that tell us how brains operate not only within a single language but also across languages. Most of the world operates with two or more languages. ![]() When you spend a lot of time code switching, and then you realize that this is something that is not well understood from a linguistic perspective, nor from a neurobiological perspective, you realize, “Oh, this is open territory.” ![]() So I grew up code switching a lot between Korean and English, as well as different varieties of English, such as African-American English and the more mainstream, standardized version. My mother is from South Korea my dad is African-American. Phillips spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas about these findings and why some scientists believe bilingual speakers may have certain cognitive advantages.Ĭan you tell me a little bit about what drew you to this topic? The new study reveals how code switching-which some multilingual speakers worry is “cheating,” in contrast to sticking to just one language-is normal and natural. This month Sarah Frances Phillips, a linguist and graduate student at New York University, and her adviser Liina Pylkkänen published findings from brain imaging that underscore the ease with which these switches happen and reveal how the neurological patterns that support this behavior are very similar in monolingual people. (Though the estimates vary, many sources assert that more than half of the planet is bilingual or multilingual.) One of the most common experiences for these individuals is a phenomenon that experts call “code switching,” or shifting from one language to another within a single conversation or even a sentence. Billions of people worldwide speak two or more languages. ![]()
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