How Does Language Change Your Brain?

Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to TestTube Plus today. I'm Trace. This is a show where we take a big topic, we break it down into a bunch of different pieces so we all get it a little better. This is episode 2 of 5 on language. And today, we're going to talk about how language makes your brain bigger. Literally, it does that. When you have a new language in your brain, your brain has to essentially grow in size. It has to make more connections. It has to learn how to do this whole new thing. And a Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy had a study where students were tasked with learning a language at a very fast rate. MRI scans were showing that specific parts of the brain were developing in size. They were getting bigger just because they were learning a language. Another group was tasked with learning something else. You guys learned this. Their brain structures didn't change in size at all. So learning a language is really great for your brain for a number of different reasons. It also significantly improves cognitive function when you pick up a new language. A study found that young adults proficient in two languages performed better on attention tests, had better concentration as well, than those who spoke only one language. This is a study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. There was also a landmark study in the Annals of Neurology by the American Neurological Association. And this was a longitudinal study. So what they did is, it was over time. They scanned kids' brains, and then came back decades later and scanned their brains again. And they found better cognitive function at an older age when they learned a second language at an early age. So if they learned a language when they were young, they had better cognitive function when they were older. It actually slowed down brain aging and held off Alzheimer's in these people for more than 4.3 years, or approximately that. Cognitive functions were not hindered. And in fact, their brains were healthier as adults because they'd learned a second language as a kid. Isn't that great? Being bilingual, or trilingual, or more is really awesome for your brain. So what happens in your brain when you hear a word is that the sound is arriving in sequential order. So your brain starts to populate the rest of the word as it hears it, sort of like Google Autocomplete, right? You start typing, and you're getting things, and it's trying to figure out what you're typing. It's the same thing your brain does that, too. So if I were trying to say the word canister, your brain hears can. And your brain, just now when I said that, started putting words together inside of itself. It was like can, Canada, cannot, cannery, cannabis, candle, canonical, canal. It was like, I'm trying to figure this out. Of course, that's just English words. When you're bilingual, it's also going to include words from your second language. And if you're trilingual, third language. It's going to try all of these different combinations. That is a lot of processing. Requires a lot of effort. The thing is, though, that would make you think that language was determining what you're thinking, which isn't really true at all, although it's still debated. One of our writers here came up with a quote based on a number of other different ideas, which is, culture could be shaped through the prism of language, which we really liked. According to Roman Jacobson, a world-renowned linguist, languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not in what they may convey. So language doesn't determine what you think, but it can determine how you think about things. So the word fork in French is a feminine word. In Spanish, it's a masculine word. Many Latin-based languages have masculine and feminine words. So the word playa in Spanish means beach, and it is a feminine word because it ends in an A. If it ended in an O, it would be a masculine word. So what they did in this study is they asked people to say a word, like the word fork, in a cartoon voice. The participants in French made a high-pitched voice because that word is feminine. In Spanish, they made a masculine grunty voice because that word is masculine. It's the same word. It's a fork. It's just a thing. But we ascribe ideas to it based on our own language. Our language determines. It's the prism in which we see the world. It's really an interesting way to look at it. Another example might be some indigenous tribes will say north, south, east, and west rather than saying left or right. So when we're walking down the street and you ask somebody where to go, they'll say, oh, go down there and turn right. Some people in English, but also some tribes will just say, go down here and turn east. Now, depending on which way you're facing, east is never gonna change, but right will. And as a consequence, the people in these tribes have usually better spatial orientation because they always understand where they're facing. Russian speakers who have more words for light and dark blue are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. And that also works in English. Think about it this way. Designers or people who work in fashion or people who work in color are better at describing color. And some theories would suggest that they actually see, physically see more color than people who don't have words for that. If you see three different pinks in a row, and some people say, well, that's pink, and that's magenta, and that's fuchsia. Some people would just say pink, and that's also pink. It's like a different pink, and that's a different pink. They may physically remember those things later as just one shade of pink because that's how their language has changed their perception. English is a Germanic language, which makes languages like Scandinavian and Dutch easier to learn. And it's also Latin-based, which makes French, Italian, and Spanish easier to learn. The thing is, there's no origin sharing with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic. So that makes them very difficult to learn. The easiest language to learn when you're an English speaker according to the Foreign Service Institute comes in various categories. So category one takes about 23 to 24 weeks or about 600 hours at most, and you can learn Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Latin-based languages, especially. Easy, because English also based in there. Category two takes about 30 weeks, 750 hours. That's German, completely different pronunciations and things, lots of different words, much more complicated. Category three, 36 weeks or about 900 hours. You can get Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili. You're getting more and more complicated, less and less similar to your native language. Again, this is for English speakers. Category four is 44 weeks or about 1,100 hours. You get Thai, Albanian, Vietnamese, Russian. Category five is 2,200 hours, and that's Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. And these are languages just like English, except they're not at all like English. Some of these languages have basis in ideograms instead of vocabulary construction in the way that English does. And on top of that, Mandarin is very famously has tones. That is to say it's got a variety of different tonal levels that you will have to speak in, and different tones mean different things. There's also something else when you get to things like Mandarin, where you have tonal languages. Languages where if I say hi versus hi, those can be two very different meanings. And this is why Chinese and similar languages are very difficult for English speakers. We're not used to speaking in tones. And science does say though, interestingly, that tonal language speakers have distinct advantages when they're learning to play or at least understand musical instruments. Because a PLOS One study looked at Cantonese speakers who had no musical training. They possessed pitch and tone understanding similar to trained musicians, as opposed to English speakers with no tone base. You don't understand it as easily. So languages are good for your brain. I think we can all agree. Do you know any other languages? How many do you know? Tell us down in the comments. Make sure you subscribe for more TestTube Plus. Come back tomorrow. We're gonna talk a little bit about how language evolves and also how they sometimes die. If you wanna see that, make sure you subscribe. Also check out yesterday's episode. If you didn't already, this was episode two of five on language. So hopefully you'll come back tomorrow and we'll see you then.