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NYU Abu Dhabi
A team of researchers has uncovered the various calculations made during the transition from one language to another, a discovery that helps to better understand the nature of bilingualism.
"A remarkable feature of multilingual individuals is their ability to switch quickly and accurately between their different languages," says Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at New York University and NYU Abu Dhabi Institute. . author of the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our findings help identify what is happening in the brain in this process – in particular, what neural activity is exclusively associated with the disengagement of a language and its engagement in a new language."
"Specifically, this research reveals for the first time that the disengagement of a language requires a cognitive effort, but that the activation of a new language is relatively free from a neurobiological point of view," notes Liina Pylkkanen, professor at Liina Pylkkanen. at the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology at the University of New York.
Previous research has linked language change to increased activity in areas associated with cognitive control (ie anterior and prefrontal cingulate cortex). However, it was unclear whether she was disengaging from the previous language or engaging in a new language that drives this activity.
This is largely because these two processes occur simultaneously when those who speak two languages pass from one to the other (when participants no longer speak Spanish but speak English, disabling Spanish and activating English ). ).
To unravel this dynamic, the study's researchers, who also included Karen Emmorey of San Diego State University, studied bilingual people fluent in English and American Sign Language (ASL), which often produces both. languages simultaneously.
"The fact that they can do both at the same time offers a unique opportunity to unravel the processes of engagement and disengagement – that is, how they transform languages" on "and" off "," observes Blanco-Elorrieta.
More specifically, this meant that researchers could ask participants to switch from producing both languages to producing a single language (thus isolating the process of deactivating a language) or turning an "on" language.
To capture this process, the scientists observed bilingual signers / speakers who viewed the same images and named them with semantically identical expressions. In order to evaluate the brain activity of the study subjects during this experiment, the researchers deployed magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technique that maps neuronal activity by recording magnetic fields generated by electrical currents produced by our brain.
The results showed that when bilinguals fluent in ASL and English changed language, deactivating a language resulted in increased activity in areas of cognitive control, while activating a language was not important. no different.
In other words, brain work has been devoted to "turning off" a language, with little or no cognitive effort to "activate" a second language, whether spoken or signed.
In fact, they also found that for these speakers, producing two words simultaneously (a sign and a spoken word) was not necessarily more expensive than the production of a single word. On the contrary, producing both at the same time was easier than having to remove the dominant language (in this case English) to name the picture on the screen only in ASL.
"All in all, these results suggest that the change of language is explained by the disengagement of the previous language compared to the commitment of a new language," explains Blanco-Elorrieta.
This research was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1221723), the National Institutes of Health (R01-DC010997, R01-HD047736) and the Abu Dhabi Institute of Medicine. University of New York (G1001) and the La Caixa Foundation. post-graduate scholarship.
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