Bilingual Brains

Paul Burgess drew attention to this over on facebook. It can be found here. It's interesting but I don't think it proves anything very much.

The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts - their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language - even one learned in adolescence - affects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again.
Eva Van Assche, a bilingual psychologist at the Univer­sity of Ghent in Belgium, and her colleagues recruited 45 native Dutch-speaking students from their university who had learned English at age 14 or 15. The researchers asked the participants to read a collection of Dutch sentences, some of which included cognates - words that look similar and have equivalent meanings in both lan­guages (such as “sport,” which means the same thing in both Dutch and English). They also read other sen­tences containing only noncognate words in Dutch.
Van Assche and her colleagues recorded the participants’ eye move­ments as they read. They found that the subjects spent, on average, eight fewer milliseconds gazing at cognate words than control words, which suggests that their brains processed the dual-language words more quickly than words found only in their native language.
“The most important implication of the study is that even when a per­son is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language,” Van Assche notes. “Becoming a bilingual changes one of people’s most automatic skills.” She plans to investigate next whether people who are bilingual also process auditory language information differently. “Many questions remain,” she says.

Strickly forbidden

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Mother Language Day

Today is my youngest son's birthday and so I just checked to see if February 21 marks anything else significant. It turns out that since November 17 1999 February 21 has been marked as International Mother Language Day, a UNESCO initiative building on Language Movement Day, which has been commemorated in Bangladesh since 1952, when many Bengali-speaking people were massacred by the police and army in Dhaka (formerly Dacca). International Mother Language Day is observed yearly by UNESCO member states and at its headquarters to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

The Linguapax Award is presented annually today. UNESCO sets the theme for each International Mother Language Day and holds related events at its headquarters in Paris on or around this date each year.

My son's main language is Welsh. I put it that way because

Sometimes the term first language is used for the language that the speaker speaks best (his second language then being the language he speaks less well than his first language, etc).
Sometimes the terms first language, second language and third language are used to indicate various levels of skill in a language, so that it can be said that a person knows more than one language at first or second language level.
Sometimes the term native language is used to indicate a language that a person is as proficient in as a native inhabitant of that language's base country, or as proficient as the average person who speaks no other language but that language.
Sometimes the term mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learnt at home (usually from his parents). Children growing up in bilingual homes can according to this definition have more than one mother tongue.
In the context of population censuses conducted on the Canadian population, Statistics Canada defines mother tongue as "the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census".

I think that as far as Welsh is concerned my other sons are becoming what one would call heritage speakers. A heritage speaker is someone who learned a certain language in childhood, but has subsequently used it only in a limited set of contexts (often only with family). While the heritage language would be considered a first language, the person often falls short of the full range of abilities one would expect from a native speaker. Children who immigrated before they began formal education in their native country, and children who are exposed to their immigrant parent or parents' native language at home are likely to become heritage speakers.