Monolinguists (people who speak only one language) often give different answers to the same question, depending on how the problem (say, responding to a pestilence) is framed. Frame a choice one way,--e.g., as lives saved--you get one answer. Frame it differently—as lives lost--you get a different response. That’s not terribly surprising, but now look at bilinguists (people who speak two languages). Pose the choices in their dominant language and the frame matters, but if they hear the question in their second language, the framing bias goes out the window. Now they answer the question the same way, not matter how it is framed.
A finding that people are more logical and consistent when they are using a second language is truly surprising, and full of implications. Does tbis mean that scholars whose mother tongue is not English are more rational in response to academic papers written in English than are native English speakers? When Donald Trump frames a choice as a loss, does he make people who only speak English afraid while listeners whose first language is Spanish see through the frame to the speech’s lack of logic? Many religious thinkers pursue their questions using a second language like Latin or Hebrew; does that remove emotion from their thinking? Would groups make better decisions if they ran their meetings in a foreign language?
Ai, yai yai. How topsy turvey can the world get?
These questions come up in a new book, The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa. Sad to report, after examining the matter Costa concludes that a “foreign language [does mot have] an effect on logical problems that do not involve the emotional system.” [p. 140] So scholars do not have an advantage in a second language, and there is probably no need to conduct business meetings in Esperanto. But still, the discovery has large implications for many things. Demagogues who sneer at foreigners will automatically be effective with natives who speak only one language, while emotional appeals in English to immigrants will not be as effective.
Too bad all this exciting stuff comes in the book’s last chapter. That’s where the engine begins to spark and the facts point somewhere the heart can flutter. Most of the book is slow. The author is an expert writing too basically for other experts and too dryly for non-experts. Books for a general audience ought to take the findings of science and phrase them in language the readers’ mothers might use. Here, and I’m not kidding, the author introduces a question asked by his mother and promptly translates it into the dry jargon of the academy.
Still, the tale has its moments. Of particular interest is the study of how infants come to recognize the sounds of the language spoken around them. Each language (Costa says nothing of sign languages) has its own set of sounds. For example, English has a bunch of words that begin with str-. (I pause to let readers think of their own examples.) Spanish has no such words. So babies destined to learn English keep an ear out for those sounds to signal the start of a new word, while future Spanish speakers do not. (Drive your baby crazy by reporting you have become estranged from something.) It turns out that infants with, say a mother who speaks to them in Spanish and a father who uses English with them, learn both sound systems. They listen for Spanish sounds from their mama and are tuned into English phonology when pop is doing the talking.
The book itself has a multilingual history. It was first published in Spanish and only later translated into English. The author reports that his first language was Spanish and he learned his second, Catalan, only later. Catalan is a language spoken in and around the city of Barcelona. Catalan was outlawed in the time of General Franco’s long dictatorship (1939-1975) when schools were forbidden to teach in it. In the years since Franco’s death, it has reemerged from the family scene and is in public view. (In the mornings during a visit to Barcelona, I was handed a newspaper in Catalan as I boarded the subway.) I imagine that in Franco’s time there were lots of fables about how bad it was for children to learn two languages. But an American audience in 2020 is not part of that old struggle and needs little convincing that bilingualism is a good thing.
So I can recommend the book only with a caution. Readers of this blog should be interested enough in language to benefit from this book, but if you are not already interested in bilingualism, this may not be the book to rouse your interest. On the other hand, if you re in quarantine, looking for something to do, reading the book's exciting last chapter should give you plenty to think about.
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