Language Museum Blog

Did you go to bed with headphones on the night before an important test or exam when you were at school, listening to the revision notes over and over again? Or did you listen to a recording of your speech as you drifted off to sleep the night before an important presentation at work? It may have seemed a desperate attempt to get the knowledge to stay in your head at the time, but the notion of sleep aiding learning is actually true.

Studies showed that participants who had had a short sleep during the day were able to recall information more easily, and to a greater extent if the nap was taken nearer to the time of learning. A good night’s sleep before a day of testing also gives improved results showing that we subconsciously learn while we’re asleep and can transform this into usable knowledge during the day. But how is this possible?

Everything we’ve learned during the day is reinforced as we sleep due to the fact that the brain stays active. Even a quick snooze after learning something can result in a higher recollection of what we’ve just learned. Therefore, it’s not necessarily the amount of sleep we have, but the fact that we are able to have some sleep which gives our brain a chance to process the information.

So sleep equals enhanced learning. But how does that help you with your language lessons? Don’t worry, you haven’t got to download all of your lessons and listen to them while you’re trying to drift off to sleep, and you don’t need to recite the verbs and tenses repeatedly until you fall asleep. It is a good idea, however, to do some revision not long before you go to sleep, as you’re more likely to remember it in more detail when you wake up. And if you feel like you’re having a brain overload after one of your lessons, try a power nap to help lock the information in your mind.

Do you find that things seem clearer after you’ve had some sleep? Why not see for yourself if the theory works by testing yourself to see how much you can recall from your language lessons both before and after periods of sleep.

Does speaking two languages just confuse your brain? Does bilingualism muddle your thoughts and hinder speech in both languages? Well, that used to be the general opinion, especially where children were concerned. On the contrary, we now know that the complete opposite is true, with bilingualism enhancing thought patterns and organizing them into a much clearer format.

Haven’t you ever sat and listened to someone speaking in two different languages, naturally flicking from one to the other without hesitating, enviously wishing you could do the same? This ability is due to the mental workout being bilingual gives to your brain, training it to be stronger and more flexible. The ability to multi-task, not just with languages, but with all things, becomes very apparent as does the ability for the speaker to edit the languages and information according to who they are speaking with. For example, two bilinguals will often flit between the two languages using the best words or phrases from either language to get their point across. When speaking to someone who only understands one of the languages, however, the bilingual speaker will stick to that language when conversing with them. This ‘language selection’ is a cognitive skill built up from the mental exercises used to speak two languages fluently.

Research has shown that bilinguals can comprehend languages in a different way to monolinguals, concentrating on key words or phrases when reading sentences rather than the whole text. The brain becomes more organized and filters out the relevant information. Bilingual children tend to be better at prioritizing than their peers and adults are much better at multi-tasking. Being bilingual can bolster the brain and helps to protect it from aging issues, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Do you have the ability to juggle two languages? Do you find it confusing or are your thoughts very clear and organized?

Are we alone in the universe? Who knows; but it would be naive of us to think so. And what would happen if we discovered we´re not alone? If we ever did encounter an alien species, the first stumbling block to overcome would be communication. We´d have to find a way to understand each other’s languages.

Two unmanned probes were launched by NASA over 30 years ago: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They were sent to investigate the larger planets of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn, beaming back images and data for us to analyse. They continued travelling further and Voyager 1 is now 10.5 billion miles away from Earth and Voyager 2 is 8.6 billion miles away. The mission has been successful so far…with one odd occurrence a few years ago.

Despite no previous disruptions, on 22^nd April 2010, Voyage 2 suddenly started transmitting odd messages. The usual data streams which had been consistent for three decades were suddenly being transmitted in an unknown data format. The scientists at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were unable to fathom out their meaning or the reason for this unexplained change as all of the other systems on the probe seemed to be functioning correctly. Hartwig Hausdorf, a German academic, concluded that alien life forms had taken over the probe in an attempt to make contact with us. Seem too far-fetched? Maybe not…

The space probes were never just intended for exploration. Both of them were fitted with a Golden Record, a phonograph record containing sounds and images of life on Earth in 55 languages, intended as greetings for extraterrestrial life forms or for humans in the future. So maybe the possibility of making contact with alien life isn´t such a stretch of the imagination after all. Whether you´re hoping for a future exchange of dialogue with an extraterrestrial, planning on striking up a conversation with a resident alien of the human kind, or simply interested in the challenge of learning a new language that´s alien to you, get out of your comfort zone and take a leap into the unknown!

Interesting article in the Telegraph with a sub-heading boldly stating that teenagers are creating “a secret language to stop adults knowing what they are up to”.

Reading the rest of the text, it’s hard to grasp what all the fuss is about – surely teenagers have been creating new slang to communicate for a very long time? The only new aspect is the use of social networking sites.

Lisa Whittaker, a postgraduate student at the University of Stirling, who studied teens aged 16-18 on Bebo in Scotland, said the slang had been created to keep their activities private, and cited the example of one young girl who was sacked after bosses found pictures of her drinking on the website.

“Young people often distort the languages they use by making the pages difficult for those unfamiliar with the distortions and colloquialisms.,” she said.

“The language used on Bebo seems to go beyond abbreviations that are commonly used in text messaging, such as removing all the vowels.

“This is not just bad spelling, which would suggest literacy issues, but a deliberate attempt to creatively misspell words.

I guess at least this research puts to rest fears that the internet and texting are producing bad spellers – they’re just being creative!

A new study has shown that language structure may be more closely tied to social structure than previously thought.

Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have published a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges long-held views of how languages became so different. Traditional thinking holds that languages developed because of “random change and historical drift”. The differences in space and time throughout history have evolved the separation between English and Mandarin, for example.

The “Linguistic Niche Hypothesis”, however, argues that languages evolve within particular socio-demographic niches.

The researchers found striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language — such as its population and global spread — and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers — and those that have spread around the world — were found to have far simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. For example, languages spoken by more than 100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.

Larger populations tend to have simpler pronoun and number systems and a smaller number of cases and genders and in general do not employ complex prefixing or suffixing rules in their grammars. A consequence is that languages with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time. Although a number of researchers have predicted such relationships between social and language structure, this is the first large-scale statistical test of this idea.

The results draw connections between the evolution of human language and biological organisms. Just as very distantly related organisms converge on evolutionary strategies in particular niches, languages may adapt to the social environments in which they are learned and used. (Source: Science Daily)

There are many benefits to speaking more than one language – from the ability to communicate with more people to increased cultural awareness.

Now scientists have discovered that multilingualism can increase your brain power. A new study from the European Commission has found that the ability to speak multiple languages can be beneficial to many areas of the human brain.

David Marsh, specialized planner at the Continuing Professional Development Centre of Jyväskylä University, who coordinated the international research team behind the study, says that especially the research conducted within neurosciences offers an increasing amount of strong evidence of versatile knowledge of languages being beneficial for the usage of an individual’s brain.

“The research report brings forth six main areas where multilingualism and hence the mastery of complex processes of thought seem to put people in advantage. These include learning in general, complex thinking and creativity, mental flexibility, interpersonal and communication skills, and even a possible delay in the onset of age-related mental diminishment later in life,” Marsh relates. (Source: Science Daily)

Interestingly, it seems that the benefits may not be limited to just fluent bi- and multi- linguals. The research found that even beginners in a new language may have altered electrical currents in the brain. Read the full article at Science Daily.

I found an interesting article on ScienceDaily.com reporting on research that says bilingual people can’t ‘turn off’ their second language when not using it.

Not being bilingual myself, I have always assumed there is some kind of switch in the brain when you choose to speak in a different language. This appears not to be the case:

According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it appears humans are not actually capable of “turning off” another language entirely. Psychologists Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert Hartsuiker and Kevin Diependaele from Ghent University found that knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.

The article goes on to say:

According to the psychologists, it is the overlap of the two languages that speeds up the brain’s activation of cognates. So even though participants did not need to use their second language to read in their native-language, they still were unable to simply “turn it off.” It appears, then, that not only is a second language always active, it has a direct impact on reading another language–even when the reader is more proficient in one language than another.

I’d be interested to hear any anecdotes from bilinguals about their experience with this.

Bad news if your grammar is terrible – even monkeys can recognise your mistakes.

Well… sort of. Researchers have said that a particular kind of monkey are able to hear if the order of syllables in a word is “wrong”.

The cotton-top tamarins were first familiarised with two-syllable terms, and then tested the following day to see how they reacted to familiar and unfamiliar word patterns. The study found that the monkeys “looked to the speaker” when unfamiliar words were presented.

Of course, the researchers weren’t merely having fun playing with monkeys, the results have implications for humans also:

Marc Hauser, who was also involved in this study, told BBC News that the results showed how human language had incorporated memory processes that were not “language-specific”.
“Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals,” he said. “This has an important role. In bird song or whale song, for example, there’s a temporal ordering to the notes and that’s critical for communication.”
And it goes beyond that. “In primates, this ordering is vital for learning,” explained Professor Hauser. “In tool use, primates learn from each other that you do this first, then you do that, then it’s that.”
Professor Hauser described how evident this innate ability is when a child learns language.
“As a child learns to use the past tense,” he said, “they may generalise and use a suffix wrongly, but they will never generalise in the wrong direction. “You never hear them say ed-walk instead of walked.”

Read the full article here, or the full research paper here.