There's no doubt that speakers of more than one language have nimble brains. Meet four bilinguals whose languages paved the way to multifaceted lives.
By Carlin Flora, published on September 01, 2010 - last reviewed on September 05, 2010
Some are children of enterprising immigrants or embattled refugees. Others live along borders or are part of a minority that keeps its heritage while blending into the mainstream. Still others have spent years memorizing vocabulary lists and parsing sentences. All told, half of the world's population conducts life in multiple languages.
Bilingualism doesn't just apply to the small percentage of people who are perfectly fluent in two tongues. Bilinguals might speak beautifully in one language without being able to read or write it. And they may have acquired their second tongue as a child, a teen, or an adult.
People who are bilingual are often asked which language they think in, but when people are walking down the street, riding a bus, or jogging in the woods, their thoughts may not be in a particular language, points out Francois Grosjean, author of the research-based Bilingual Life and Reality. "Thought can be visual-spatial and nonlinguistic. It is only when planning to speak that individual languages actually intervene," Grosjean says.
While they do repress words in one tongue in order to speak another, bilinguals don't completely lose access to the first. For example, bilingual subjects reading sentences with cognates—examples would be "bleu" in French and "blue" in English—take less time to process them than other words, hinting at how they are always dipping into their total language knowledge. And they often intermingle their languages (Spanglish, Chinglish), not out of laziness or lack of ability, but in a natural quest for optimal self-expression and understanding.
Infants as young as 4 months who live in bilingual environments can distinguish between two languages, monitoring lip and facial movements. Babies also show a strong preference for the language their mother spoke during pregnancy. We're built to acquire language, of course, but we're also built to learn and accommodate more than one. Monolinguals are essentially underutilizing their abilities: Brain scans show that while monolinguals use established language centers such as Broca's area, bilinguals employ far more of the neural landscape when expressing themselves.
