Surely you have ever seen one bilingual person trying hard to remember a word in his native language and you thought he was doing it to show off his abilities. If you haven’t believed it, that person is you. But the truth is, whether it’s you or not, that person has reason to be confused. And it is that the bilingual or multilingual brains they tend to mask the language they are more used to.
This actually makes sense. When bilingual people think of a word, their brain translates it into all the languages they control. That is, if someone who controls English and French wants to talk about a house, her brain is activated with both languages. Both to say “house” and to pronounce “maison”. But he will only say it in one language, so the other is inhibited. This inhibition sometimes fails, which is why people who speak many languages sometimes get confused. But, above all, the native is inhibited, since, having spoken it from birth and with great ease, he would prevail over the others.
This is one of the conclusions of an investigation carried out by the team of Mathieu Declerckfrom the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, and described in an article in the BBC in 2022. Through several experiments carried out with bilinguals and multilinguals, this scientist, who speaks both Dutch and English and French, analyzed the functioning of the brain when processing so many languages. But his team is not the only one that has done this type of investigation.
Bilinguals messing with their native language
Declreck’s team has carried out several experiments with bilinguals in different languages. One of them, very common in this area of neuroscience, consists of showing them on a computer screen a succession of colors in both languages that speak. As they read them in the requested language, their brain activity, to check which regions work the most in the process. Thus, it is seen that they not only use regions related to language. Also those that process the attention. And if at any given moment the activity in them decreases, they can get confused, generally against their native language. This is because this is a lot more inhibited.
Another team, led by Tamar Golanfrom the University of California San Diego, conducted a study with speakers of Spanish and English, who had to read texts in only one of the languages or mixed. Thus, it was seen that, in the mixed texts, in some cases they tended to confuse words, even though they were reading them written in another language. And again, they used to get confused towards what is not their native language.
The same goes for the accent. Sometimes they didn’t miss the word, but the accent with which they read it did. But that is not all. In another study involving monolingual or bilingual Italians who also spoke English, it was seen that when they read a text in Italian, despite being everyone’s native language, their brains processed it in a different way.
The advantages of bilingualism in the brain
In 2015, Albert Costa and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, researchers from the Pompeu Fabra Universityfrom Barcelona, carried out a study aimed at analyzing the brains of bilingual people, both when they learn two languages from a young age and when they acquire the second as adults.
Like the Dutch team, they found differences in the brains of bilingual and monolingual people. Again, they found that learning a second language changes the processing of the first. But, in addition, they saw that the executive functions of the brain. These are the abilities that allow us to consciously control thoughts, emotions and actions in order to achieve objectives. Therefore, the brain, by itself malleableadapts to control or inhibit languages as needed.
Although more research would be needed to corroborate it, these Spanish scientists believe that this increase in brain processing demands could improve the Cognitive reserve of the elderly.
It is clear that speaking a second language is always beneficial. In fact, it has been seen that some specific languages can influence recovery from a stroke. Bilingualism is more than advantageous. Therefore, the next time we laugh at someone for not remembering a word in their native language, we better remember that he is not pretending and that this confusion is proof that his brain is on plan. shape. At least when it comes to languages.