AsianScientist (Jun. 15, 2011) – Over half the world’s population speaks more than one language, but it is not clear how these languages interact in the brain.
A new study in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it.
Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the U.K. and is fluent in English.
Zhang and colleagues set out to study how two different languages are stored in the bilingual brain. For example, if you read in English, you don’t really require your knowledge of Chinese; do you switch it off?
Earlier research in European languages found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and French or Spanish and Italian, which already have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary. This not the case for English and Chinese.
Zhang’s test subjects, Chinese students at the University of Nottingham, were each shown pairs of words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly that the person didn’t realize they’d seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real word as quickly as possible. This was just a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.
Now here’s the trick: although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection – but only if you know how they’re written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be “thing,” which is written 东西 in Chinese, and the second might be “west,” which is written 西 in Chinese. The character for “west” appears in the word “thing,” but these two words are totally unrelated in English.
Zhang found that, when two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster – even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Hence, the brains of fluent English speakers automatically translated what they saw into Chinese – even when the languages are different and unrelated, the authors say.
Zhang hopes that understanding the way languages are linked in the brain could someday help people learn second languages.
“When people learn two languages, they automatically make the link between them. We would like to find out how the link between the two languages influences language processing,” she mused.
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Source: Association for Psychological Science.
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