Top Stories - Posted by Emma Rayner-Nottingham on Friday, July 1, 2011 10:08 - 1 Comment 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Bilingual brain translates in an instant
Knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages, like Chinese and English.
U. NOTTINGHAM (UK) —The bilingual brain is able to process two languages automatically without forethought, even when they are very different.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
More than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language but up to now it has not been clear how the two interact when the languages are dissimilar, unlike pairs of European languages which share the same alphabetical characters and even words.
A new study, published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who speak English fluently translate English into Chinese without ever thinking about the process.
“Earlier research in European languages has found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and Dutch, which have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary.
“That’s not true for English and Chinese,” says University of Nottingham PhD student Taoli Zhang, who, like all the volunteers in the study, is originally from China, but lives in the UK and is fluent in English.
For the study, each person was shown pairs of English words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly (for just 59 milliseconds) that the person didn’t realize they had seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real English word as quickly as possible. This was simply a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.
But the test had a clever trick to it which would shed light on whether the bilingual volunteer accessed their Chinese words.
Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection—but only if the subject knew how they are written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be “thing” which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be “west” which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for “west” appears in the word “thing” but these two words are totally unrelated in English.
When two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster—even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair.
Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.
“This research shows that reading words in a second language is influenced by the native language through automatic and very fast word translation in the bilingual brain,” says Walter van Heuven, lecturer in psychology.
More news from University of Nottingham: http://communications.nottingham.ac.uk/News.html
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So much more so, when the individual processing the words is trilingual, or knows perhaps four or even more languages than that… the more the better, when it comes to association of ideas, roots of languages, building upon connected sequences, idioms and sayings.
What is totally amazing is that there are many languages that have completely different grammatical patterns, different sentence structures, and surprisingly most share the common trait of having exceptions to many of the rules and regulations, not to mention the occurrences of misplaced modifiers, etc…
It seems that upon building ones database of vocabulary, the individual conversing in a multitude of tongues is always attempting to make order out of the chaos, making sense, while disregarding that which is nonsense. Does this make any sense to you, too?
A good indication of how well a person is doing in a language might be to observe how they suceed in a game of scrabble, for example, or a similar such game using creativity, stored knowledge and an atmosphere of competition. For it is in this complex world in which we live, that making ourselves understood by others is an increasingly more difficult task, while avoiding, at the same time, being misunderstood, by accident.
Communication on a superior level is key to finding a good job, succeeding in interpersonal relationships beginning with the home, the extended family, society (whether attending school and/or religious congregations, work, or other associations) and additional people with whom we are meeting and interacting for the first time…
Humans are not the only species to communicate in different languages. We have only begun to do more complicated studies on inter-species communications on a more sophisticated level. Big wild female cats upon approaching their would-be hidden babies, for example, have been seen to imitate the chirping sounds of birds, to avoid their young becoming the prey because of their being detected by some predators; in other words the mother does not want to give their hiding place away, knowing only their young would recognize their altered or disguised voice!
Recently, a video circulated of a domesticated house cat barking like a dog, but upon being discovered by its guardian (human) it quickly turned to meowing like a normal cat as if nothing had ever happened, not wishing to get found out!
Communication is unpredictable, one may say something, and yet mean something else. There is humor, not only in humans’ langauges, as originally believed, but many species play games and find reason to be amused, if only we could learn how to detect when they are smiling, and/or laughing, realizing that what semes absurd in their eyes, as well!