Transcriber: dabin kim Reviewer: Robert Tucker
(Reads Japanese from screen)
(Reads Ukrainian from screen)
(Reads Turkish from screen)
(Reads Mandarin Chinese from screen)
(Reads Spanish from screen)
(Reads Portuguese from screen)
To process those languages, just now,
namely Japanese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese,
one has to stimulate various different parts of the brain
because of the unique properties of how these languages sound,
how they look,
how they’re structured grammatically,
as well as their relations with each other.
We all think we know that the purpose of learning a foreign language
is to facilitate intercultural communication,
and to boost economic power.
I mean, it almost seems too obvious.
But what many of us fail to realize is that language learning
is also very much a matter of public cognitive health.
And it's essential that we all pay attention to this kind of health
because nobody, not you, not me, no one,
is truly exempt from declining brain health in old age.
For many people, this can imply
worrying issues such as mild cognitive impairment
or even dementia.
It can be a slow and debilitating process
of walking into forgetfulness,
where time after time
you find yourself uncontrollably forgetting words, forgetting names,
forgetting what you just learned.
And in the more severe cases of dementia,
you can even forget what you did five minutes ago,
or the relationships that once mattered to you.
Although cognitive decline cannot really be avoided,
there are ways to at least delay its development.
Indeed, and although this is still sometimes debated,
but bilingualism comes with its own set of cognitive benefits.
And for many people,
lifelong bilingualism can even defer
the onset of dementia by four to five years.
Even for people who never get dementia in their lifetime,
bilingualism contributes to a stronger preservation of the brain,
and problems tend to emerge much later in life.
Hence, while being bilingual
doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent;
it trains your brain to be sharper and more functional
for a longer period of your life.
My research interests in languages and brain training
began when I was still living in Taiwan.
Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret -
At a TEDTalk ... I know.
(Laughter)
So, for quite some time,
I had this massive crush on this cute Siberian guy,
who lived next door to the university where I taught.
Yeah.
And then I thought to myself,
"OK, in order to catch his attention,
I'm going to learn Russian, his native language."
But, me, back then, nobody warned me that, when it comes to learning Russian,
the first ten years are the most difficult.
(Laughter)
Not only was I struggling with incredibly long words
that, to me at least, were really long, and, well, just difficult to pronounce,
but also I found the grammar to be highly complex, abstract even.
And it took me multiple attempts
to even just wrap my head around the most basic concepts of grammar.
I tried really hard,
but, in a way, I felt that I had to keep developing new neural pathways,
in order to learn every aspect of this language.
And, in a way,
I felt that in comparison
with the other languages that I had learned previously,
I was using a very different dimension of my brain
to learn Russian.
Later on, I met a friend from Ukraine,
who went on to be my closest, closest [inaudible] Taiwan.
He still is today.
Because we were so close, out of curiosity, in 2019,
I started to learn Ukrainian, his native language.
And I noticed that even though it was also a Slavic language
that use the Cyrillic alphabet
and bore some degree of similarity to Russian,
it wasn't any easier for me to learn.
This is because over the course of history,
the two countries had undergone
different kinds of influences from other cultures,
which reflected quite much in their languages.
I had to use a lot of attentional control
to learn Ukrainian:
to not only identify the areas whereby the two languages may overlap,
but the many, many major and minor differences of vocabulary between them.
I did this so much,
to a point where I felt that I was engaging in
a constant game of strategy, observation, and reaction speed.
From these experiences, I begin to suspect
that every language I learned
prompted me to use different brain muscles.
And I began to think that maybe, just maybe,
linguistic diversity can have very interesting implications
for a field as seemingly irrelevant as neuroscience.
Now, the romance with the Siberian guy is now dead,
but the experience sparked life
throughout the entire course of my Ph.D. trajectory.
I got so inspired to study
language learning strategies and the neuroscience of multilingualism,
during my doctorate career.
Nowadays, I look into how people process languages -
they're very different from their native tongues -
and what kinds of thinking happens when they do so.
The main idea of my work in bilingualism theory is
that the way that different languages are designed
may, in fact, strengthen our brain health
through interestingly, different neural pathways.
There's perhaps a very interesting and illustrative example
for me to start this argument.
As some of you may be aware,
the Croatian and Bosnian languages, they're highly similar.
I mean, they're almost identical.
And the differences are very, very subtle.
They separate into two different kinds of languages,
mainly for historical and political reasons.
As such, a Croatian or a Bosnian person
could come up to you and claim to be technically bilingual,
without having to give the effort to learn a second language.
And by those standards, it wouldn't be reasonable to assume
that a Croatian/Bosnian bilingual
would exercise the brain in the same way
as, let's say, a Croatian/Korean bilingual.
So, what is it exactly about the designs of languages
that helps to train the brain?
Now, firstly, we have writing scripts.
Some languages, such as the Japanese Kanji script,
or the Chinese languages,
they're highly visual in nature,
and each character is shaped in a way
that attempts to illustrate an object or a concept.
Research has shown
that the processing of such languages
can stimulate the visual spatial areas of the brain.
Now, this can be really helpful
because visual spatial cognition
is often the first to deteriorate in neurodegenerative diseases.
But that's not to say that alphabetic languages,
languages that function with spelling, such as English, Hindi, and Modern Greek,
don't train the brain at all..
No.
In fact, that's far from what the evidence tells us.
Studies have revealed that spelling in an alphabetic language,
particularly a non-native one,
can stimulate the phonological and analytical areas of the brain.
Now, this, in the long term,
it can really boost your executive control,
which is the collaboration
of the working memory, flexible thinking, and self-regulation.
Another aspect whereby languages can differ drastically is tones.
In many of what we call total languages,
such as Vietnamese, Cantonese/Mandarin Chinese,
the slightest change of tones can indicate a difference in meaning.
For example, in Mandarin, I can say: mā, má, mǎ, mà.
And they all mean different things.
(Laughter)
Learners of a tonal language
can sharpen their sensitivity to nuances in sounds.
And this can be really helpful
because deficits in central auditory processing
are often key indicators of age-related cognitive decline.
Another aspect whereby languages can differ drastically is grammar.
Now, I know, I know, grammar tends to be
one of the biggest annoyances in the second language classroom.
I mean, I know only one person on this planet
who actually enjoys learning a bunch of grammatical rules
and applying them and filling the blanks.
Me.
(Laughter)
But let me tell you, the processing of grammar
is a very natural mechanism that can bring brain stimulation
in languages like Polish, Italian, German,
languages that feature complex systems of tense, case, gender, prepositions,
and change of grammatical forms.
The learner finds himself
constantly going through multiple layers of processing,
in order to extract more information about the sentence.
Now, this takes up a lot of working memory,
and the demand is even higher when grammar is produced orally in speech
because there's a need to keep up with the talking speed,
while simultaneously juggling a bunch of the grammatical concepts,
and somehow still trying to find out the most accurate grammatical form.
Now, this threefold interaction of memory, attention, and reaction speed,
can create more neuron,
and more connections between those neurons.
Oftentimes, I hear about people saying that they want to give up
learning a language with incredibly complex grammar.
But, I would argue that, from a cognitive perspective,
challenging grammar is exactly the point.
Another aspect whereby languages can differ drastically -
Sorry ...
Sometimes, the training that a second language can bring to you
also depends on its relation to your first language,
or other languages that you may already know.
If you're a native English speaker
learning a language as different as Hebrew, for example,
the amount of vocabulary that you have to acquire from scratch
is enormous,
which can have an impact on the capacity of memory that you have to develop.
And because the language is so different to what you're used to,
it can be challenging to navigate.
And, thus, you push your brain to reorganize neural pathways
to make your thinking more efficient.
Now, these efficient thinking pathways,
they can help you retain cognitive abilities
when your brain starts to weaken with older age.
So, what happens when you learn a language
that's similar to one that you already know?
If you are a Spanish speaker
trying to produce in the language as similar as Portuguese, for example,
you are strongly exercising what we call inhibitory control,
which, in this case, is the ability
to produce accurate sentences in Portuguese,
while ignoring distractions from similar forms in Spanish.
Now, this inhibitory control, in the long run, can be really useful
because the loss of inhibition
is a key symptom that we see in many dementia patients.
And I also believe
that because inhibitory control
happens quite much in the frontal part of the brain,
it can have interesting implications for certain kinds of dementia,
such as frontal temporal dementia.
Now, what am I trying to get at with all this?
The point of my talk today is not for you to somehow become fluent
in ten languages across your lifetime,
because, well, not everyone has time for that - come on -
and it's not always in everyone's life plans.
However, as far as cognitive health is concerned,
it can be beneficial
to undergo daily five-minute efforts of brain training.
Language learning is an activity
that can naturally bring out that kind of brain training.
It can include observing different writing script,
spelling a different alphabet,
memorizing a new vocabulary,
exploring a language with different tonal nature,
or producing in a different language.
Whatever it is, engagement with the complex functions of language
can train your brain to work harder.
And the more diverse this experience is,
the more areas of brain muscles we get to work out.
In this process, we talk not so much about
mastery or fluency of the foreign language,
but rather three things: exposure, effort, and consistency.
Towards the end, I just wanted to say
that languages are the most amazing and fundamental invention of humankind.
I mean, if we think about it,
without languages, we wouldn't have civilization,
and we surely wouldn't be sitting here today exchanging ideas.
I'm so proud of our collective humanity
for being incredibly creative and expressive
in designing this one thing that we all call language.
And it's just encouraging to see how this very linguistic diversity
can be a natural mechanism that protects against cognitive decline.
Thank you.
(Applause)