Strategies

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

• Improving your multitasking skills
• Age and individual differences
• About multitasking
• Why multitasking is a problem
• Multitasking and driving

Improving your multitasking skills

Teaching older brains to regain youthful skills

Researchers have succeeded in training seniors to multitask at the same level as younger adults. Over the course of two weeks, both younger and older subjects learned to identify a letter flashed quickly in the middle of a computer screen and simultaneously localize the position of a spot flashed quickly in the periphery as well as they could perform either task on its own. The older adults did take longer than the younger adults to reach the same level of performance, but they did reach it.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/mu-yct100206.php

Age and individual differences

Teen's ability to multi-task develops late in adolescence

A study involving adolescents between 9 and 20 years old has found that the ability to multi-task continues to develop through adolescence. The ability to use recall-guided action to remember single pieces of spatial information (such as looking at the location of a dot on a computer screen, then, after a delay, indicating where the dot had been) developed until ages 11 to 12, while the ability to remember multiple units of information in the correct sequence developed until ages 13 to 15. Tasks in which participants had to search for hidden items in a manner requiring a high level of multi-tasking and strategic thinking continued to develop until ages 16 to 17. "These findings have important implications for parents and teachers who might expect too much in the way of strategic or self-organized thinking, especially from older teenagers."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-05/sfri-tat051205.php

About multitasking

Stress disrupts task-switching, but the brain can bounce back

A new neuroimaging study involving 20 male M.D. candidates in the middle of preparing for their board exams has found that they had a harder time shifting their attention from one task to another after a month of stress than other healthy young men who were not under stress. The finding replicates what has been found in rat studies, and similarly correlates with impaired function in an area of the prefrontal cortex that is involved in attention. However, the brains recovered their function within a month of the end of the stressful period.

Full text available at http://www.pnas.org/content/106/3/912.abstract
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/ru-sdh012709.php

Asymmetrical brains let fish multitask

A fish study provides support for a theory that lateralized brains allow animals to better handle multiple activities, explaining why vertebrate brains evolved to function asymmetrically. The minnow study found that nonlateralized minnows were as good as those bred to be lateralized (enabling it to favor one or other eye) at catching shrimp. However, when the minnows also had to look out for a sunfish (a minnow predator), the nonlateralized minnows took nearly twice as long to catch 10 shrimp as the lateralized fish.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/623/2?etoc

How much can your mind keep track of?

A recent study has tried a new take on measuring how much a person can keep track of. It's difficult to measure the limits of processing capacity because most people automatically break down large complex problems into small, manageable chunks. To keep people from doing this, therefore, researchers created problems the test subjects wouldn’t be familiar with. 30 academics were presented with incomplete verbal descriptions of statistical interactions between fictitious variables, with an accompanying set of graphs that represented the interactions. It was found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and were completely incapable of solving problems with five-way interactions. The researchers concluded that we cannot process more than four variables at a time (and at that, four is a strain).

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/aps-hmc030805.php

We weren't made to multitask

A new imaging study supports the view that we can’t perform two tasks at once, rather, the tasks must wait their turn — queuing up for their turn at processing.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/aps-wwm060704.php

Why multitasking is a problem

Talking, walking and driving with cell phone users

Another cellphone-multitasking study! Compared with people walking alone, in pairs, or listening to their ipod, cell phone users were the group most prone to oblivious behavior: only 25% of them noticed a unicycling clown passing them on the street, compared to 51% of single individuals, 61% of music player users, and 71% of people in pairs. In fact, cell phone users even had problems walking — walking more slowly, changing direction more often, being prone to weaving, and acknowledging other people more rarely.

Hyman, I.E.Jr, Boss, S. M., Wise, B. M., McKenzie, K. E., & Caggiano, J. M. (2009). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9999(9999), n/a. doi: 10.1002/acp.1638.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/w-tuc101909.php

Chronic media multitasking correlated with poor attention

Media multitasking — keeping tabs on email, texts, IM chat, the web — is routine among young people in particular. We know that humans can’t really multitask very successfully — that what we do is switch tracks, and every time we do that there’s a cost, in terms of your efficiency at the task. But what about long-term costs of chronic multitasking? A study that selected 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least, from a pool of 262 students, found those who multitasked least performed better on three cognitive tests that are thought to reflect ability to ignore distracting information, ability to organize things in working memory, and ability to switch between tasks. The findings can’t answer whether chronic media multitasking reduces these abilities, or whether people who are poor at these skills are more likely to succumb to chronic media multitasking, but they do demonstrate that chronic media multitasking is associated with this particular information processing style.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/multitasking/

Cell phone ringtones can pose major distraction, impair recall

Cell phones ringing during a concert is not simply irritating. It appears that in a classroom, a cell phone left to ring for 30 seconds significantly affected the students’ recall for the information presented just prior to and during the ringing. The effect was even greater when the phone’s owner rummaged frantically through her bag. Ringtones that are popular songs were even greater distractions. However, with repeated trials, people could be trained to reduce the negative effects; being warned about the distracting effects also helped people be less affected.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/wuis-cpr060209.php

Police with higher multitasking abilities less likely to shoot unarmed persons

In a study in which police officers watched a video of an officer-involved shooting that resulted in the death of the officer before participating in a computer-based simulation where they were required to make split-second decisions whether to shoot or not to shoot someone, based on slides showing a person holding either a gun or a harmless object like a cell phone, it was found that among those more stressed by the video, those with a lower working memory capacity were more likely to shoot unarmed people. Working memory capacity was not a significant factor for those who did not show heightened negative emotionality in response to the video.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/gsu-pwh033009.php

Switchboard in the brain helps us learn and remember at the same time

It’s very common that we are required to both process new information while simultaneously recalling old information, as in conversation we are paying attention to what the other person is saying while preparing our own reply. A new study confirms what has been theorized: that there is a bottleneck in our memory system preventing us from doing both simultaneously. Moreover, the study provides evidence that a specific region in the left prefrontal cortex can resolve the bottleneck, possibly by allowing rapid switching between learning and remembering. This is supported by earlier findings that patients with damage to this area have problems in rapidly adapting to new situations and tend to persevere in old rules. The same region is also affected in older adults.

Full text is available at http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000011
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/plos-sit010909.php

Neural bottleneck found that thwarts multi-tasking

An imaging study has revealed just why we can’t do two things at once. The bottleneck appears to occur at the lateral frontal and prefrontal cortex and the superior frontal cortex. Both areas are known to play a critical role in cognitive control. These brain regions responded to tasks irrespective of the senses involved, and could be seen to 'queue' neural activity — that is, a response to the second task was postponed until the response to the first was completed. Such queuing occurred when two tasks were presented within 300 milliseconds of each other, but not when the time gap was longer.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/vu-nbf011807.php

How multitasking impedes learning

A number of studies have come out in recent years demonstrating that the human brain can’t really do two things at once, and that when we do attempt to do so, performance is impaired. A new imaging study provides evidence that we tend to use a less efficient means of learning when distracted by another task. In the study, 14 younger adults (in their twenties) learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. For one set of the cards, they also had to keep a running mental count of high tones that they heard while learning the classification task. Imaging revealed that different brain regions were used for learning depending on whether the participants were distracted by the other task or not — the hippocampus was involved in the single-task learning, but not in the dual-task, when the striatum (a region implicated in procedural and habit learning) was active. Although the ability of the participants to learn didn’t appear to be affected at the time, the distraction did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session. In particular, on the task learned with the distraction, participants could not extrapolate from what they had learned.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060726083302.htm

Doing two things at once

Confirmation of what many of us know, and many more try to deny - you can't do two complex tasks simultaneously as well as you could do either one alone. Previous research has showed that when a single area of the brain, like the visual cortex, has to do two things at once, like tracking two objects, there is less brain activation than occurs when it watches one thing at a time. This new study sought to find out whether something similar happened when two highly independent tasks, carried out in very different parts of the brain, were done concurrently. The two tasks used were language comprehension (carried out in the temporal lobe), and mental rotation (carried out in the parietal lobe). The language task alone activated 37 voxels of brain tissue. The mental rotation task alone also activated 37 voxels. But when both tasks were done at the same time, only 42 voxels were activated, rather than the sum of the two (74). While overall accuracy did not suffer, each task took longer to perform.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/health/anatomy/31BRAI.html

The costs of multitasking

Technology increasingly tempts people to do more than one thing (and increasingly, more than one complicated thing) at a time. New scientific studies reveal the hidden costs of multitasking. In a study that looked at the amounts of time lost when people switched repeatedly between two tasks of varying complexity and familiarity, it was found that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they knew better. These results suggest that executive control involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting ("I want to do this now instead of that") and rule activation ("I'm turning off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this").

http://www.apa.org/journals/xhp/press_releases/august_2001/xhp274763.html

Brain's halves compete for attention

Claus Hilgetag, of Boston University, and his colleagues fired focused magnetic pulses through healthy subjects' skulls for 10 minutes to induce 'hemispatial neglect'. This condition, involving damage to one side of the brain, leaves patients unaware of objects in the opposite half of their visual field (which sends messages to the damaged half of the brain). The subjects showed the traditional symptoms of hemispatial neglect. They were worse at detecting objects opposite to the numb side of their brain, and worse still if there was also an object in the functioning half of the visual field. Yet numbed subjects were better at spotting objects with the unaffected half of their brains. This behavior confirms the idea that activity in one half of the brain usually eclipses that in the opposite half. The finding supports the idea that mental activity is a tussle between the brain's many different areas.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/010830/010830-5.html

Multitasking and driving

Why cell phones and driving don't mix

A host of studies have come out in recent years demonstrating that multitasking impairs performance and talking on a cell phone while driving a car is a bad idea. A new study helps explain why. In two different experiments, subjects were found to be four times more distracted while preparing to speak or speaking than when they were listening. The researcher expects the effect to be even stronger in real-life conversation. It was also found that subjects could complete the visual task in front of them more easily when the projected voice also was in front. This suggests that it may be easier to have all things that require attention in the same space.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080531084958.htm

Talking on a cellphone while driving as bad as drinking

Yet another study has come out rubbing it in that multitasking comes with a cost, and most particularly, that you shouldn’t do anything else while driving. This study demonstrates — shockingly — that drivers are actually worse off when using a cell phone than when legally drunk. The study had 40 volunteers use a driving simulator under 4 different conditions: once while legally intoxicated, once while talking on a hands-free cell phone, once while talking on a hand-held cell phone, and once with no distractions. There were differences in behavior —drunk drivers were more aggressive, tailgated more, and hit the brake pedal harder; cell phone drivers (whether hands-free and hand-held ) took longer to hit the brakes, and got in more accidents. But in both cases drivers were significantly impaired.

http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.htm3?article_id=218392815
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/uou-doc062306.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,,1809549,00.html

Performing even easy tasks impairs driving

In yet another demonstration that driving is impaired when doing anything else, a simulator study has found that students following a lead car and instructed to brake as soon as they saw the illumination of the lead car's brake lights, responded slower when required to respond to a concurrent easy task, where a stimulus - either a light flash in the lead car's rear window or an auditory tone - was randomly presented once or twice and participants had to indicate the stimulus' frequency. The finding suggests that even using a hands-free device doesn’t make it okay to talk on a cell phone while driving.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2006/pr060303.cfm

Talking and listening impairs your ability to drive safely

A study involving almost 100 students driving virtual cars has provided evidence that people have greater difficultly maintaining a fixed speed when performing tasks that simulated conversing on a mobile phone. Both speaking and listening were equally distracting.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/jws-cpu082205.php

Cell phone users drive like seniors

Another study on the evils of multitasking, in particular, of talking on a cellphone while driving. This one has a nice spin — the study found that when young motorists talk on cell phones, they drive like elderly people, moving and reacting more slowly and increasing their risk of accidents. Specifically, when 18- to 25-year-olds were placed in a driving simulator and talked on a cellular phone, they reacted to brake lights from a car in front of them as slowly as 65- to 74-year-olds who were not using a cell phone. Although elderly drivers became even slower to react to brake lights when they spoke on a cell phone, they were not as badly affected as had been expected. An earlier study by the same researchers found that motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunken drivers with blood alcohol levels exceeding 0.08.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/uou-cpu020105.php

Complex mental tasks interfere with drivers' ability to detect visual targets

The researchers studied 12 adults who drove for about four hours on the highway north from Madrid. During the journey, drivers listened to recorded audio messages with either abstract or concrete information (acquisition task), and later were required to freely generate a reproduction of what they had just listened to (production task). Although the more receptive tasks – listening and learning -- had little or no effect on performance, there were significant differences in almost all of the measures of attention when drivers had to reproduce the content of the audio message they had just heard. Drivers also performed other tasks, either live or by phone. One was mental calculus (mentally changing between Euros and Spanish pesetas) either with an experimenter in the car, talking to the driver, or with the driver speaking by hands-free phone. One was a memory task (giving detailed information about where they were and what they were doing at a given day and time). Both tasks significantly impacted on the driver's ability to detect visual targets. In the experimental variation that examined the impact of hands-free phone conversation, message complexity made the difference. The relative safety of low-demand phone conversation -- if hands-free and voice-operated --appeared to be about the same as that of live conversation. The findings also confirm that the risk of internal distraction (one’s own thoughts) is at least as relevant as external distraction.

Goldarecena, M.A.R. & González, L.M.N. 2003. Mental Workload While Driving: Effects on Visual Search, Discrimination and Decision Making. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 9(2)

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/apa-mcm062403.php

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

Literate Arabic speakers have bilingual brains

Research has found that Arabic-speaking students tend to be less proficient in reading than other students are in their native language. Spoken Arabic comes in a variety of dialects and is quite different from the common written Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic - MSA). A new imaging study has now compared brain activity in a priming task among trilinguals fluent in MSA, spoken Arabic and Hebrew. The results revealed that the cognitive process in using MSA was more similar to that employed for Hebrew, and less similar to the cognitive process of using the spoken native language. These results not only help explain why learning to read is more difficult for Arabic speakers, but also suggests that the most effective way of teaching written Arabic is by using techniques usually employed for the instruction of a second language — including exposing children to written Arabic in preschool or kindergarten.

Ibrahim, R. 2009. The cognitive basis of diglossia in Arabic: Evidence from a repetition priming study within and between languages. Journal of Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 2.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/uoh-wiu110409.php

Relearning a forgotten language is easier for those under 40

A small study involving 7 native English speakers who had learned either Hindi or Zulu as children when living abroad, but now had no memory of the neglected language, found that the three who were under 40 could relearn certain phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to recognize, but those over 40, like those who had never been exposed to the language in childhood, could not. The amount of experience of exposure in childhood ranged from 4 to 10 years, and it’s especially notable that the 47-year old individual who had 10 years exposure, having become almost fluent, still could not recover the ability to distinguish these difficult sounds. It should also be noted that where the ability was recovered (and recovered almost to native ability), it took about 15-20 training sessions. The findings point to the value of early foreign language learning.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/afps-uio092409.php

Exposure to two languages carries far-reaching benefits

A new study provides evidence that bilingual speakers find it easier to learn a new language than those who only know one language. The study compared the ability of three groups of native English speakers - English-Mandarin bilinguals, English-Spanish bilinguals and monolinguals - to master words in an invented language that bore no relationship to English, Spanish or Mandarin. The bilingual participants mastered nearly twice the number of words as the monolinguals. The finding adds more support to the value of introducing another language to children at a young age.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-05/nu-ett051909.php

Bilingual babies get a head start on executive functioning

A number of studies have pointed to benefits of being bilingual, but many people still believe that the experience of two languages in infancy may cause confusion and impair their acquisition of language. Now a new study shows that bilingual babies quickly adapt to different learning cues at seven months old compared with babies from single-language households. The study involved families in the Trieste area of Italy, where parents spoke to infants from birth using both Italian and Slovenian mother tongues. When bilingual and monolingual babies were first taught to look at one side of a screen in response to a sound cue (and in anticipation of a visual "reward" image of a puppet), then required to switch sides, it was found that bilingual babies quickly learned to look at the other side, but the monolingual babies never adapted to the change. The findings indicate that bilingualism gives an advantage above the purely linguistic, in executive function, which is consistent with other research indicating bilingual children have improved attention.

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090413-bilingual-smart.html

Anatomical advantage for second language learners

Based on the size of a small brain region called Heschl's Gyrus (HG) in the left hemisphere, researchers found they could predict who would be more successful in learning 18 words in an invented language (those predicted to be "more successful learners" achieved an average of 97% accuracy in identifying the pseudo words, compared to 63% from those deemed "less successful"). The size of the right HG was not important. The finding was surprising, given that this area, the primary region of the auditory cortex, is typically associated with handling the basic building blocks of sound — whether the pitch of a sound is going up or down, where sounds come from, and how loud a sound is — rather than speech per se.

http://www.physorg.com/news104599345.html

Early music training 'tunes' auditory system

Mandarin is a tonal language, that is, the pitch pattern is as important as the sound of the syllables in determining the meaning of a word. In a small study, a Mandarin word was presented to 20 adults as they watched a movie. All were native English speakers with no knowledge of Mandarin, but half had at least six years of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12, while half had minimal or no musical training. As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers measured the accuracy of their brainstem ability to track three differently pitched "mi" sounds. Those who were musically trained were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians. The study is the first to provide concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds, and supports the view that experience with music at a young age can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. The findings are in line with previous studies suggesting that musical experience can improve one's ability to learn tone languages in adulthood, and are also consistent with studies revealing anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some children with learning disabilities which can be improved by auditory training. The findings are also noteworthy for implicating the brainstem in processing that has been thought of as exclusively involving the cortex.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-03/nu-rfm031207.php

Why learning a new language may make you forget your old one

The common experience of having difficulty remembering words in your native language when you’ve been immersed in a new language is called first-language attrition, and new research has revealed that it occurs because native language words that might distract us when we are mastering a new language are actively inhibited. The study also found that this inhibition lessened as students became more fluent with the new language, suggesting it principally occurs during the initial stages of second language learning.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070118094015.htm

Bilingualism has protective effect in delaying onset of dementia

An analysis of 184 people with dementia (132 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; the remaining 52 with other dementias) found that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the 91 monolingual patients was 71.4 years, while for the 93 bilingual patients it was 75.5 years — a very significant difference. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/bcfg-css011107.php

How bilingualism affects the brain

Using a new technique, researchers have shed light on how bilingualism affects the brain. The study involved 20 younger adults of whom half were bilingual in Spanish and English. Similar brain activity, in the left Broca's area and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), was found in bilinguals and monolinguals when the task involved only one language. However, when the bilinguals were simultaneously processing each of their two languages and rapidly switching between them, they showed an increase in brain activity in both the left and the right hemisphere Broca's area, with greater activation in the right equivalent of Broca's area and the right DLPFC. The findings support the view that the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals are similar, and both process their individual languages in fundamentally similar ways, but bilinguals engage more of the neurons available for language processing.

The study was presented at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting on October 14-18 in Atlanta, Ga.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/dc-drf101706.php

How does the bilingual brain distinguish between languages?

Studies of bilingual people have found that the same brain regions, particularly parts of the left temporal cortex, are similarly activated by both languages. But there must be some part of the brain that knows one language from another. A new imaging study reveals that this region is the left caudate — a finding supported by case studies of bilingual patients with damage to the left caudate, who are prone to switch languages involuntarily.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/608/2?etoc

Fast language learners have more white matter in auditory region

An imaging study has found that fast language learners have more white matter in a region of the brain that’s critical for processing sound. The study involved 65 French adults in their twenties, who were asked to distinguish two closely related sounds (the French 'da' sound from the Hindi 'da' sound). There was considerable variation in people’s ability to learn to tell these sounds apart — the fastest could do it within 8 minutes; the slowest were still guessing randomly after 20 minutes. The 11 fastest and 10 slowest learners were then given brain scans, revealing that the fastest learners had, on average, 70% more white matter in the left Heschl's gyrus than the slowest learners, as well as a greater asymmetry in the parietal lobe (the left being bigger than the right).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8964

Language learning declines after second year of life

A study involving 96 deaf children who had received cochlear implants during their first four years of life has found that the rate of language learning was greatest for those given implants before they turned two. Children given implants at three or four years of age acquired language skills more slowly. The finding supports the idea that there is a 'sensitive period' for language learning, and suggests that deaf children should get cochlear implants sooner (it is still relatively rare for them to be given to children younger than two).

The findings were presented on 16 May at the Acoustical Society of America conference in Vancouver, Canada.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050516/full/050516-1.html

Learning languages increases gray matter density

An imaging study of 25 Britons who did not speak a second language, 25 people who had learned another European language before the age of five and 33 bilinguals who had learned a second language between 10 and 15 years old found that the density of the gray matter in the left inferior parietal cortex of the brain was greater in bilinguals than in those without a second language. The effect was particularly noticeable in the "early" bilinguals. The findings were replicated in a study of 22 native Italian speakers who had learned English as a second language between the ages of two and 34.

Mechelli, A., Crinion, J.T., Noppeney, U., O'doherty, J., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R.S. & Price, C.J. 2004. Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, 431, 757.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3739690.stm

Being fluent in two languages may help keep the brain sharper for longer

A study of 104 people aged between 30 and 88 has found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally. Those fluent in two languages responded faster on tasks assumed to place demands on working memory, compared to those who were fluent in just English, at all age groups. This is consistent with the theory that constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions. Bilingual volunteers were also much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age. The finding is consistent with other research suggesting that mental activity helps in protecting older adults from mental decline. The participants were all middle class, and educated to degree level. Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and were fluent in both English and Tamil.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3794479.stm

Learning a second language may not be as laborious as believed

A study of adult learners of a second language has revealed that their brains still possess a surprising facility for learning words — much greater than the learner is consciously aware of. College students learning first-year French demonstrated brain activity that was clearly discriminating between real and pseudo-French words after only 14 hours of classroom instruction, although the students performed only at chance levels when asked to consciously choose whether or not the stimuli were real French words. The greater the exposure to French, the larger the difference in brain response to words and pseudo words.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/uow-baw061104.php

Beneficial effects of bilingual learning

A recent Canadian study comparing young monolingual children to bilingual found that bilingual children were much better at a non-language cognitive task. The 4-6 year old bilingual children were versed in a spoken language and a signing one. It was suggested that their higher cognitive skill was due to the increased computational demands of processing two different language systems.

Baker, S.A., Kovelman, I., Bialystok, E. & Petitto, L. A. (2003, November). “Bilingual children’s complex linguistic experience yields a cognitive advantage.” Presented at 2003 Society For Neuroscience conference. New Orleans, LA.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-11/sfn-ssb111103.php

Both languages active in bilingual speakers

An imaging study involving bilingual Dutch and English speakers suggests that when a bilingual person is speaking a second language, the first language is always active and cannot be suppressed. It was thought that an environment of total immersion in a language would provide massive exposure to a second language and suppress the first language. However, it’s now suggested that a large component of language immersion involves learning a new set of cues to the second language. To test this, students with no exposure to German or Dutch were taught 40 Dutch words. Some students learned the words in association with their English counterparts and others learned the words in association with a picture. Some of the pictures were oriented in the normal way and others were upside down or otherwise skewed. People who learned the Dutch in association with an object that was oriented uniquely were faster to later translate English words into Dutch. The mis-oriented pictures served as a unique cue.

The research was presented at the Second Language Research Forum, October 18, in Tucson, Arizona.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-10/ps-bla101703.php

Second language best taught in childhood

Sadly, it does appear that the easiest time to learn a second language is, indeed, in childhood. An imaging study has found that when grammatical judgement in the second language was compared to grammatical judgement in first language (as evidenced by performance on sentences with grammatical mistakes), there was no difference in brain activation in those who learned the second language as children. However, people who acquired the second language late and with different proficiency levels displayed significantly more activity in the Broca's region during second language grammatical processing. "This finding suggests that at the level of brain activity, the parallel learning of the two languages since birth or the early acquisition of a second language are crucial in the setting of the neural substrate for grammar."

Study finds there's a critical time for learning all languages, including sign language

It is generally believed that there is a critical period for learning a first language, and that children not exposed to language during this period will never fully acquire language. It is also thought that this might apply as well to second language learning — that those who learn another language after puberty can never become as fluent as those who learn it before puberty. A recent study suggests that this may also be true for non-verbal languages. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was found that patterns of brain activity in bilingual people who learned American Sign Language (ASL) before puberty differed from those who learned it after puberty.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-01/uow-sft010202.php