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How to UseRetrieval Practiceto ImproveLearning

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How to UseRetrieval Practiceto ImproveLearning

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Unconscious learning could be the secret to speeding up learning a second language.

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Unconscious learning could be the secret to speeding up learning a second language.

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https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unconscious-language-learning

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When linguists talk about unconscious or implicit language learning, they don't mean learning while you sleep. Rather, they are talking about one of the most intriguing of all mental phenomena: the ability to learn the complex and subtle regularities that underlie a language without even realising.

For children, such 'implicit' language learning seems to happen spontaneously in the first few years of life; yet, in adulthood, learning a second language is generally far from effortless and has varied success.

So marked is the difference between first- and second-language learning - at least when it takes the form of classroom learning - it might suggest that implicit learning makes no significant contribution to learning a second language. Or it may indicate that typical foreign language teaching doesn't take full advantage of the process.

The challenge that faces linguists is how to test whether implicit learning is taking place. How can you differentiate between a person consciously recognising a certain pattern or rule in the language they are learning and the same person unconsciously knowing that something sounds right simply because their brain has judged it to be right?

The new approach to solving the puzzle taken by Dr John Williams at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and his collaborator, Dr Janny Leung from the University of Hong Kong, has been to invent an artificial language. Participants were tested to see whether they correctly acquired, over periods as short as one hour, an understanding of patterns embedded within the artificial language.

An example of their technique is to teach participants four novel forms of the word 'the' ( gi, ro, ul and ne), telling them that the forms encode a certain meaningful dimension (e.g. gi and ro should be used for describing near objects, ul and ne for far objects). The aim is to see if the participants can spontaneously pick up a correlation with another, hidden, meaning (e.g. that gi and ul should be used with animate nouns and ro and ne with inanimate nouns). The novel forms are embedded in English phrases such as 'I was terrified when I turned around and saw gi lion right behind me'.

Do they pick up on the concealed pattern when tested? "The answer is yes," said Dr Williams, whose research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. "We found significantly above-chance selection of sentence constructions that were 'grammatically correct' according to the hidden pattern. Yet, the participants had no awareness of what they had learned or how. Moreover, we were able to show learning of the same material by native speakers of two typologically very different languages, English and Cantonese."

Interestingly, picking up the hidden pattern unconsciously doesn't always happen - if, for instance, the hidden pattern is linguistically unnatural, such as a correlation with whether an object makes a sound or not. "One explanation could be that certain patterns are more accessible to language learning processes than others. Perhaps our brains are built equipped to expect certain patterns, or perhaps they process some patterns better than others," he added.

The research provides a window onto unconscious learning processes in the mind and highlights an important element that has practical implications for language teaching. In each test, the learner's attention was directed to the part of the sentence that contained the hidden pattern. By directing attention, it seems that other elements of the sentence construction are picked up unconsciously.

"In a teaching situation, merely teaching the rules of a language may not be the only answer," explained Dr Williams. "Instead, using tasks that focus attention on the relevant grammatical forms in language could help learners access unconscious learning pathways in the brain. This would greatly enhance the speed of acquisition of a second language."

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economic and social research council (esrc) economic and social research council (esrc) john williams john williams bilingualism

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spotlight on language sciences bilingualism

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spotlight on language sciences school of arts and humanities

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-department of theoretical and applied linguistics department of theoretical and applied linguistics

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When linguists talk about unconscious or implicit language learning, they don't mean learning while you sleep. Rather, they are talking about one of the most intriguing of all mental phenomena: the ability to learn the complex and subtle regularities that underlie a language without even realising.

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There are also drawbacks to being bilingual

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There are also drawbacks to being bilingual

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The ability to speak more than one language certainly has its perks. It enables you to work in another country, for example, interact with people while travelling, or consume foreign media.

Bilingualism is very common - current estimates are that more than half of the world's population is bilingual and that this prevalence is rising.

Cognitive psychologists have been interested in how bilingualism shapes the mind for almost a century. There are those who suggest that in order to speak in one language, bilinguals have to suppress the influence of the other. Research from the past three decades has argued that this unique form of language processing "trains the brain" in the use of non-verbal abilities known as " executive functions " such as ignoring irrelevant information or shifting attention.

Bilinguals of different ages and cultural backgrounds have been shown to be faster and more accurate than their monolingual peers when performing cognitive tasks demanding these abilities. Furthermore, it has been argued that bilingualism may lead to a delayed onset of symptoms associated with dementia.

But the scientific community recently has become increasingly sceptical of the bilingual advantage hypothesis. One of the main points of criticism is that differences between monolinguals and bilinguals when it comes to executive function are not always apparent. This has generated a heated debate, especially in the Bilingualism Forum of the scientific journal Cortex, about whether bilingualism is associated with cognitive advantages or not.

Fresh challenge

It appears that research on bilingualism is at a turning point. We need to pursue a new approach to understand, beyond those individual examples of executive functions, how the bilingual mind works. We have attempted to address this challenge by testing whether bilinguals and monolinguals differ in terms of how accurately they can assess their own performance.

This ability is called metacognition and is associated with, but separate from, other areas where bilinguals have been shown to have an advantage. Surprisingly, however, we found that bilinguals had less insight into their performance than their monolingual peers.

Joining the dots

In an effort to find out whether bilinguals also display advantages in other cognitive abilities (beyond executive function), we evaluated metacognitive processing in young adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Metacognition is the ability to evaluate one's own cognitive performance or simply to have "thoughts about thoughts".

This ability is a crucial function of everyday life, when we have to make decisions where the outcomes are not immediate. For example, when an entrepreneur reviews their company's performance, they need to take into account a variety of factors - including, for example, revenues and expenses - in order to evaluate whether the company is doing well. Confidence in their ideas and performance can be the determining factor in whether they decide to keep investing time in their company or give up and apply for another job (the so-called " exploitation exploration trade-off ").

In our research, we presented participants with a situation in which they had to observe two circles on a screen and guess which one contained more dots. Sometimes the difference was obvious, making the decision easy, while at other times the decision was very difficult (for example, one circle contained 50 dots and the other 49). Participants were then asked to determine how confident they were in their decision on a scale from less to more confident than normal.

Folkes et al, 2016, Author provided

Over the course of two experiments, we found that bilinguals and monolinguals were equally likely to choose the circle containing the highest number of dots. However, monolinguals were better able than bilinguals to discriminate between when they were right and when they were wrong. In other words, bilinguals had less insight into their performance than monolinguals. This went against our initial predictions, as we expected to find a bilingual advantage in metacognitive processing. These results indicate that bilingualism may be associated with cognitive disadvantages as well as benefits.

What's next?

The Multilanguage & Cognition lab (MULTAC) at Anglia Ruskin University is currently undertaking a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to enhance our understanding of the bilingual mind.

The lab has already published evidence of cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism, suggesting that bilinguals are better at filtering out verbal interference as well as visual attention, specifically spotting the difference in a visuo-spatial working memory task.

This new research indicates that bilingual people may experience a disadvantage in metacognition. We hope that this new direction in bilingualism research will encourage further attention and enable us to resolve theoretical debate through the adoption of open-minded, empirically driven exploration of cognitive effects (both positive and negative) that may be associated with learning more than one language.
Julia Ouzia, PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, Anglia Ruskin University and Tomas Folke, PhD candidate, University of Cambridge This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

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the conversation the conversation tomas folke tomas folke bilingualism

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cognition school of the biological sciences

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-department of psychology department of psychology

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Opinion: There are also drawbacks to being bilingual

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The ability to speak more than one language certainly has its perks. It enables you to work in another country, for example, interact with people while travelling, or consume foreign media. Bilingualism is very common - current estimates are that more than half of the world's population is bilingual and that this prevalence is rising.

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Science Bulletins: Bilingual Brain 'Switch' Found

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Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry.

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Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry.

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Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn't difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.

These differences are apparent just three days out of the womb. This suggests that they pick up elements of their parents' language before they're even born, and certainly before they start to babble themselves.

Birgit Mampe from the University of Wurzburg analysed the cries of 30 French newborns and 30 German ones, all born to monolingual families. She found that the average German cry reaches its maximum pitch and intensity at around 0.45 seconds, while French cries do so later, at around 0.6 seconds.

These differences match the melodic qualities of each respective language. Many French words and phrases have a rising pitch towards the end, capped only by a falling pitch at the very end. German more often shows the opposite trend - a falling pitch towards the end of a word or phrase.

These differences in "melody contours" become apparent as soon as infants start making sounds of their own. While Mampe can't rule out the possibility that the infants learned about the sounds of their native tongue the few days following their birth, she thinks it's more likely that they start tuning into the own language in the womb.

In some ways, this isn't surprising. Features like melody, rhythm and intensity (collectively known as prosody) travel well across the wall of the stomach and they reach the womb with minimum disruption. We know that infants are very sensitive to prosodic features well before they start speaking themselves, which helps them learn their own mother tongue.

But this learning process starts as early as the third trimester. We know this because newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice compared to those of strangers. And when their mums speak to them in the saccharine "motherese", they can suss out the emotional content of those words through analysing their melody.

Mampe's data show that not only can infants sense the qualities of their native tongue, they can also imitate them in their first days of life. Previously, studies have found that babies can imitate the vowel sounds of adults only after 12 weeks of life, but clearly other features like pitch can be imitated much earlier. They're helped by the fact that crying only requires them to coordinate their breathing and vocal cord movements, while making speech sounds requires far more complex feats of muscular gymnastics that are only possible after a few months.

Reference: Current Biology doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

More on child development:

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Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby's cry

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You could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. French newborns cry a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.

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Why the baby brain can learn two languages at the same time.

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Why the baby brain can learn two languages at the same time.

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How do babies learn language? Irene Zaccari, CC BY-NC-ND

Any adult who has attempted to learn a foreign language can attest to how difficult and confusing it can be. So when a three-year-old growing up in a bilingual household inserts Spanish words into his English sentences, conventional wisdom assumes that he is confusing the two languages.

Research shows that this is not the case.

In fact, early childhood is the best possible time to learn a second language. Children who experience two languages from birth typically become native speakers of both, while adults often struggle with second language learning and rarely attain native-like fluency.

But the question remains: is it confusing for babies to learn two languages simultaneously?

When do babies learn language?

Research shows babies begin to learn language sounds before they're even born. In the womb, a mother's voice is one of the most prominent sounds an unborn baby hears. By the time they're born, newborns can not only tell the difference between their mother's language and another language, but also show a capability of distinguishing between languages.

Language learning depends on the processing of sounds. All the world's languages put together comprise about 800 or so sounds. Each language uses only about 40 language sounds, or "phonemes," which distinguish one language from another.

At birth, the baby brain has an unusual gift: it can tell the difference between all 800 sounds. This means that at this stage infants can learn any language that they're exposed to. Gradually babies figure out which sounds they are hearing the most.

John Mayer, CC BY

Between six and 12 months, infants who grow up in monolingual households become more specialized in the subset of sounds in their native language. In other words, they become "native language specialists." And, by their first birthdays, monolingual infants begin to lose their ability to hear the differences between foreign language sounds.

Studying baby brains

What about those babies who hear two languages from birth? Can a baby brain specialize in two languages? If so, how is this process different then specializing in a single language?

Knowing how the baby brain learns one versus two languages is important for understanding the developmental milestones in learning to speak. For example, parents of bilingual children often wonder what is and isn't typical or expected, or how their child will differ from those children who are learning a single language.

My collaborators and I recently studied the brain processing of language sounds in 11-month-old babies from monolingual (English only) and bilingual (Spanish-English) homes. We used a completely noninvasive technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which precisely pinpointed the timing and the location of activity in the brain as the babies listened to Spanish and English syllables.

We found some key differences between infants raised in monolingual versus bilingual homes.

At 11 months of age, just before most babies begin to say their first words, the brain recordings revealed that:

Babies from monolingual English households are specialized to process the sounds of English, and not the sounds of Spanish, an unfamiliar language

Babies from bilingual Spanish-English households are specialized to process the sounds of both languages, Spanish and English.

Our findings show that babies' brains become tuned to whatever language or languages they hear from their caregivers. A monolingual brain becomes tuned to the sounds of one language, and a bilingual brain becomes tuned to the sounds of two languages. By 11 months of age, the activity in the baby brain reflects the language or languages that they have been exposed to.

Is it OK to learn two languages?

This has important implications. Parents of monolingual and bilingual children alike are eager for their little ones to utter the first words. It's an exciting time to learn more about what the baby is thinking. However, a common concern, especially for bilingual parents, is that their child is not learning fast enough.

We found that the bilingual babies showed an equally strong brain response to English sounds as the monolingual babies. This suggests that bilingual babies were learning English at the same rate as the monolingual babies.

Parents of bilingual children also worry that their children will not know as many words as children who are raised with one language.

jakeliefer, CC BY

To some extent, this concern is valid. Bilingual infants split their time between two languages, and thus, on average, hear fewer words in each. However, studies consistently show that bilingual children do not lag behind when both languages are considered.

Vocabulary sizes of bilingual children, when combined across both languages, have been found to be equal to or greater than those of monolingual children.

Another common concern is that bilingualism causes confusion. Part of this concern arises due to "code switching," a speaking behavior in which bilinguals combine both languages.

For example, my four-year-old son, who speaks English, Spanish, and Slovene, goes as far as using the Slovene endings on Spanish and English words. Research shows bilingual children code-switch because bilingual adults around them do too. Code-switching in bilingual adults and children is rule-governed, not haphazard.

Unlike monolingual children, bilingual children have another language from which they can easily borrow if they can't quickly retrieve the appropriate word in one language. Even two-year-olds modulate their language to match the language used by their interlocutor.

Researchers have shown code switching to be part of a bilingual child's normal language development. And it could even be the beginning of what gives them the extra cognitive prowess known as the "bilingual advantage."

Bilingual kids are at an advantage

The good news is young children all around the world can and do acquire two languages simultaneously. In fact, in many parts of the world, being bilingual is the norm rather than an exception.

It is now understood that the constant need to shift attention between languages leads to several cognitive advantages. Research has found that bilingual adults and children show an improved executive functioning of the brain - that is, they are able to shift attention, switch between tasks and solve problems more easily. Bilinguals have also been found to have increased metalinguistic skills (the ability to think about language per se, and understand how it works). There is evidence that being bilingual makes the learning of a third language easier. Further, the accumulating effect of dual language experience is thought to translate into protective effects against cognitive decline with aging and the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

So, if you want your child to know more than one language, it's best to start at an early age, before she even starts speaking her first language. It won't confuse your child, and it could even give her a boost in other forms of cognition.

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Why the baby brain can learn two languages at the same time

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Any adult who has attempted to learn a foreign language can attest to how difficult and confusing it can be. So when a three-year-old growing up in a bilingual household inserts Spanish words into his English sentences, conventional wisdom assumes that he is confusing the two languages.

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Compared with people who can speak only one language, those who were familiar with multiple languages had a later onset of dementia -- even if they were illiterate and lacking formal education, Indian researchers said.

Review of records for 648 individuals diagnosed in India with dementia showed that the average age of onset was 61.1 (SD 11.4) in those who were monolingual versus 65.6 (SD 10.0) in those speaking two or more languages ( P<0.0001), according to Suvarna Alladi, DM, of Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, and colleagues.

Multilingualism appeared to delay dementia onset in multiple diagnostic categories, including frontotemporal and vascular dementia as well as Alzheimer's disease, the researchers reported online in .

"This is the largest study so far to examine the impact of bilingualism on dementia and to document a significant delay in the age at onset of dementia symptoms in bilingual patients in comparison to monolingual patients," they wrote, adding that it is also the first to show such an impact in several different types of dementia.

Alladi and colleagues argued that the study was especially significant in that the benefit of multilingualism was evident in patients who had no formal education. Many (though not all) previous studies had linked the development of "cognitive reserve," which protects individuals against cognitive impairment despite substantial brain pathology, to schooling.

When the current analysis was restricted to those individuals who were illiterate and had no formal education at all, Alladi and colleagues found a mean age of dementia onset of 59.0 in those who were monolingual versus 65.0 in those speaking two or more languages ( P=0.03).

The effect of multilingualism also remained when the researchers controlled for potential confounders such as vascular risk factors, family history of dementia, dementia severity, stroke history, sex, employment status, and rural versus urban residence.

Huntington Potter, PhD, of the University of Colorado in Denver, who was not involved with the study, called the study "very definitive" in an interview with MedPage Today.

"The fact that this study was carried out in India where many people are illiterate ... and still the benefit was seen, bolsters the idea that cognitive reserve can be acquired in the absence of formal schooling," he said.

Potter added that the finding of delayed onset in multiple types of dementia shows that cognitive reserve is protective at least somewhat irrespective of the specific dementia mechanism.

The study involved consecutive patients from the region surrounding Hyderabad who were diagnosed with dementia from 2006 to 2012. That the patients were from a single area should minimize confounding related to immigration, Alladi and colleagues argued.

Records were examined for data on their specific diagnoses (Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, or mixed dementia), sociodemographic variables, dementia severity, and cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, smoking status, and coronary artery disease. Income data were not collected but the patients' general occupational types were contained in the records.

Also included in the records were the languages spoken by the patient prior to onset of dementia. This information was typically obtained from "a reliable family member" during the patient's clinical evaluation. Of the 648 patients in the study, 257 were monolingual and 391 had two or more languages. Of the latter group, 162 spoke three and 59 spoke four or more.

Not included, however, was information on when languages beyond the first were acquired -- that is, whether during childhood or later on. Potter told MedPage Today that this was a significant limitation, since it bears on the question of whether multilingualism's impact on cognitive reserve depends on when it begins.

Evidence from other studies suggests that vigorous mental activity is beneficial for cognition throughout life, even after dementia symptoms have developed, he said. But the study by Alladi and colleagues does not speak to the issue, Potter noted.

Besides being diagnosed at an older age on average, those speaking two or more languages also differed from monolingual patients in other ways. They were significantly more likely to be male, literate, working in professional or quasi-professional jobs, living in urban areas, and showing less severe dementia at diagnosis.

Alladi and colleagues found that the mean age of dementia onset was about the same for all multilingual patients irrespective of whether they spoke two, three, or four or more languages (66.0, 65.1, and 66.2, respectively). They speculated that this lack of dose-response may indicate "that those speaking two languages have already reached a maximum level of switching," the process by which an individual selectively activates one language while suppressing others during conversation.

This "switching," they explained, calls on the brain's executive and attentional control functions. The apparent benefit of multilingualism was not affected by the specific languages that patients spoke (Telugu was the dominant language, followed by English, Hindi, and Dakkhini).

Age of dementia onset did not differ significantly according to lingualism status in patients diagnosed with Lewy body and mixed dementias, the researchers noted. But they added that relatively few patients had these diagnoses, and future studies with larger numbers of patients might yet show a benefit for multilingualism in these dementia subtypes.

The study was funded by the Indian government.

Study authors reported no relevant relationships with commercial entities.

Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD Emeritus Professor, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner

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Compared with people who can speak only one language, those who were familiar with multiple languages had a later onset of dementia -- even if they were illiterate and lacking formal education, Indian researchers said.

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Bilingual and Monolingual Baby Brains Differ in Response to Language.

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Bilingual and Monolingual Baby Brains Differ in Response to Language.

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Bilingual and monolingual baby brains differ in response to language