Language feeds the brain

by Maitri Pamo

When I was a child, my family was friends with another family with two girls who were very close in age to my sister and me. We mocked them because they would answer in English when their parents spoke to them in Spanish. We felt that it was a lacuna in their development and were pleased that we had the ability to speak a second language. My parents were strict enforcers of the ‘Spanish in the home’ rule. I am grateful for that, despite the fact that my sister and I speak English to each other now.

A few nights ago, as I was falling asleep, I recalled a poem I had memorized and found that I was making subtle muscular changes in my tongue and lips as the words appeared in my brain. The changes were clearly associated with the pronunciation of French. I was delighted to notice that I was doing it.

I have always felt that language acquisition has been easier for me than for most people who grew up monolingual. I have discovered that there are many things that are advantages for people who grow up knowing more than one language, in addition to the obvious ones of communication. NPR highlighted these advantages recently and they are compelling.

Babies, with their malleable brains, are born primed to acquire language. Dr. Janet Werker has done research building on previous work that highlights the fact that infants pay special attention to facial structures and how they differentiate when speaking various languages. All babies are born with the ability to do this, but as they age, monolingual babies lose it and bilingual babies do not. They retain it and grow up to be more perceptive to all languages. Interesting, but consequential?

Research by Dr. Ellen Bialystok has found that bilingual people actively and constantly recruit an executive control system that suppresses one language in favor of another. This mental exercise is useful by providing the brain with a constant workout that allows it to outperform monolingual brains on various tests of cognitive function and may delay the onset of dementia.

So we polyglots will be lucid longer. Good news. More time for us to enjoy our lives and our connections to our heritage, for speaking Spanish is a living link to our history. It is a commonality that can unite us and identify us as a people with common experiences and common interests.

For me, Spanish has been a key to opening conversations on random streets, for starting interactions with people who smiled delightedly as we slipped into a familiar language, the mother tongue, the feeling of home. During travel, I have relished the ability to speak to others in their native tongues; an ambassador who proves that not all U.S. citizens are monolingual – a common stereotype that U.S. schools would do well to debunk.

Contributor, Maitri Pamo.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.

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