Bilingual baby brains show increased activity in executive function regions

[eridani]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160404141743.htm

Babies raised in bilingual households show brain activity associated with executive functioning as early as 11 months of age, new research demonstrates. The study also gives evidence that the brains of babies from bilingual families remain more open to learning new language sounds, compared with babies from monolingual families.

Many brain studies show that bilingual adults have more activity in areas associated with executive function, a set of mental abilities that includes problem-solving, shifting attention and other desirable cognitive traits.

Now new findings reveal that this bilingualism-related difference in brain activity is evident as early as 11 months of age, just as babies are on the verge of producing their first words.

"Our results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function," said Naja Ferjan Ramírez, lead author and a research scientist at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) at the University of Washington.

"This suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally," she said.

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Not surprising. I think this has been shown in other studies, too.

Given that we process so much of our reality through the semantic map we use to interpret it, it makes sense that using two different "operating systems" so to speak would help keep the brain limber, imcrease the number of cross-connections and associations, etc.

I just wish my Spanish wasnt so bad.

[Igel]

2. But it's probably less touchy-feely than that.

If you're exposed to two completely different codes, you have to sort them and look for correspondences within them, reject spurious or accidental correspondences, and keep everything nicely separated. We're not looking at semantic fields very much at 11 months, and not morphology or even much syntax. We're at phonetics and phonology, and even that's a moving target for a number of years.

We learn sounds not as individual sounds but as sets of tokens of sounds. We learn them based upon contexual clues, and how they differ in explicit versus implicit, slow vs moderate vs allegro speech, based upon when a man or a woman or a child is saying them. If I say "toddler" 10 times, the 10 ts will be slightly different, the 10 ds will differ. They'll be different from what I say in Spanish or Russian for /t/ and /d/. My English /t/ is aspirated, my Russian one velarized or palatalized, my Spanish one unaspirated. My English /d/ isn't aspirated, and borders on a flap; my Russian /d/ is fully voiced, and my Spanish /d/ is likely to be allophonically an alveolar fricative or approximant. My wife's sounds are a bit different, my MIL's are different. Yet it's in some sense the same /t/ and the same /d/ for each language. It's a huge mass of data to process and somehow keep separate, however the brain does it.

For bilinguals, it means doing it all not just once in the neural space allotted, but twice, and in such a way that they don't overlap too much. (But do overlap a bit, as eye-tracked-based lexical priming studies show.) Then, as you go to speak, you have to sort through and pick, consistently and accurately, the right tokens.

This takes a lot of utterly subconscious executive functioning.

Now, if my bilinguals were actually able to generalize that executive functioning to areas other than code-switching to show ethnic affiliation, it would be grand. (Oh, wait. Most of them grew up monolingual, and have a clear first language even if English and ________ are both functionally L1s, albeit unbalanced.)

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Yeah, and the brain is clearly much more flexible around age 2-3 to pick that stuff up.

Beyond that, I'm not sure why it's exactly "touchy-feely" to point out that we sure seem to interpret reality through our semantic maps.

Seems pretty basic, and it dials directly into the problems a lot of people have mistaking their particular dogmatic interpretations of things with The Way Things Actually Are™

But, you know, ymmv on all that.

[CTyankee]

4. my grandson started Italian immersion at age 5 and he is bilingual now at 11...

with a perfect (I am told) Roman accent because his maestre is from Rome. He is the blondest, blue eyed and pale skinned Italian speaker you'll ever meet...funny that...