

Bilingualism makes the mind sharper (and helps forestall Alzheimer's) - Jun8
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html

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Jun8
Interesting:

"We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically
correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer.
They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would
say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The
bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend
to important information and ignore the less important."

~~~
T-R
One thing I've noticed as I've learned other languages is that I've become
very keenly aware of, for example, all of the different definitions/parts of
speech of the word "that" (each translates differently and takes different
parts of speech as its object), and consequently how I structure my sentences.

Of course, part of that could also be a result of my tendency to think about
grammatical correctness in terms of type systems.

~~~
Jun8
Interesting point. I read that somewhere that the usage of _the_ in English is
also a sore point for learners, and that even native speakers take 7-8 years
to master its correct usage. When I read papers from non-native but fluent
speakers, this is generally what gives them away.

~~~
ma2rten
Hmm, ...

English is not my native language, but I don't think I have problems applying
the work _the_. So I find that hard to imagine. However, my native languages
are Dutch and German, which are probably the closest two languages to English
in terms grammar. So, that could be a possible explanation.

I read that children learn to pronounce the th sound quite late. And this is
generally a give-away for of non-native speakers. Could it be that you are
confusing this with that ?

~~~
Jun8
You're right, the "th* sound is the bane of non-native speakers (maybe an
analogy would be the "ch" sound in German).

However, I was referring to the actual usage of the definite article, not its
spelling. I think the problems here are of two different kinds:

Those who come from languages where there is no definite article (e.g.
Chinese, Turkish) struggle to understand the correct usage. This is one of the
most common glitches I hear from my Mandarin speaking colleagues (in addition
to omitting plural forms).

Not all IE languages have articles, i.e. Hindi, Russian, Latin. Simplifying
thing, one may say that English is a curious mixture (or bastard :-) of French
and Anglo-Saxon, both of which has articles. It shed a lot of its grammatical
rules over the centuries (e.g. noun declension, verb endings) but still carry
vestiges, like the appendix, which is what confuses other IE speakers. These
errors, tend to be the opposite of the Mandarin case, i.e. the over-
regularization of _the_ usage. My wife, who is near-native in French, does
this frequently in her English usage.

This brings to mind a slightly different topic: The prediction of gender for
(genderless) words adopted from English, i.e. if you are German and see the
word _iPad_ for the first time, which gender do you use? This study
([http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.851&rep=rep1&type=pdf))
tackled this problem for Scandinavian languages and found that it is quite
difficult, they get ~70 accuracy.

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bmohlenhoff
So do you think that "speaking" multiple computer languages counts the same as
speaking multiple spoken languages, in terms of mental fitness and the other
benefits outlined by this study? Obviously something like C++ isn't as
complicated as something like Japanese, but still I wonder if programming-
related skills like the ability to work concurrently at multiple levels of
abstraction also prevent cognitive decline.

~~~
wccrawford
When you're programming in Ruby, do you mentally shift into Ruby mode, or do
you translate everything from English into Ruby?

Bilinguals don't translate from 1 language to another, they actually think in
that language while using it, to the point that you can actually see attitude
changes based on which language they are using.

I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into
whatever programming language I'm using.

~~~
lemming
_I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into
whatever programming language I'm using._

Really? I think the only time I do this is when something is sufficiently
tricky that I probably have to draw it to work out what it should be doing
("Ok, so I pass this in here, and then it could flow through to here or
here..."). Otherwise, assuming I'm sufficiently fluent in the language I'm
programming in it just "flows" out, as when I'm speaking in Spanish (a second
language I speak well) - there's no intermediate translation from English in
either case.

~~~
wccrawford
Interesting. I've been disturbed by my inability to stop translating when
trying to understand and speak Japanese, but I've also noticed I'm not as
bothered by translating as most people seem to be. (Maybe it's a perfectly
acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there
yet.)

Coding is the same way... I think "I'll loop over that" and then proceed to
write out how to do it in whatever programming language I'm working with.
Sometimes I even write comments in English and then go back and fill in the
code that does what the comments want.

~~~
nebaneba
> (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or
> maybe I'm just not there yet.)

You are not there yet. Here's why. In pre-fluency stages of language
acquisition, the taxing part of language parsing is memory retrieval, iow,
mapping meaning from language A to language B. If you are well-versed at this,
it can happen sufficiently quickly. For example, "a machine with four wheels
that brings people places" --> car. After enough practice, you "bypass" the
"machine" and retrieve "car" without consciously looking up the word.
Imagining that happening for every single word, and every single sentence
construction. That's when you're "there".

As for coding, there is an easy example: iterative looping vs. map/reduce
operations. These can express the logic but are conceptually different: one is
to repeatedly track states across some number of times, the other is to apply
a transformation function to a set of items. To reuse the car analogy, a
looped factory would be like taking parts and assemble 100 cars, and a map
factory would be like taking parts and assembling all the wheels, then all the
engines, then all the doors and so on.

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kragen
(obligatory correlation does not imply causation comment)

The authors did go to some effort to rule out other causes of correlation,
though: "The effect does not appear to be attributable to such possible
confounding factors as education, occupational status, or immigration.
Bilingualism thus appears to contribute to cognitive reserve, which acts to
compensate for the effects of accumulated neuropathology."

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stygianguest
If it forestalls Alzheimer's there should be significantly more of it in the
exceptionally monolingual Anglophone world compared to the rest of us. Can't
find any evidence in that direction, other factors such as longlivity and
simple genetics probably interfere too much.

------
Apocryphon
What about trilingual or quadlingual people?

~~~
nebaneba
As mental exercise, it's certainly helpful, but the marginal benefit is
probably lower than going from monolingual to bilingual.

The second language is crucial because it provides basis for comparison. If
all you've ever used is Internet Explorer, that's the entirety of your
internet experience. But if you've tried just another browser, you learn to
appreciate the difference.

