How our brains cope with speaking more than one language

Austin Gardner • July 27, 2022

"You're having to learn how to pull back on the reins something that you normally never have to inhibit, it just comes out naturally, right?

Nicole Chang has written a wonderful article dated 19th July 2022 on language learning. I want to challenge you to read it. Click here and enjoy.

She says: Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar and even accents can get mixed up. This can reveal surprising things about how our brains work.

Navigating such interference could perhaps be part of what makes it hard for an adult to learn a new language, especially if they've grown up monolingual.

"Every time you go to speak this new language, the other language is like, ‘hey, I'm here, ready to go’,” says Matt Goldrick, aprofessor of linguistics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "So, the challenge is, you have to suppress this thing that is so automatic, and so easy to do, in favour of this thing that's incredibly hard to do as you're first learning it.

"You're having to learn how to pull back on the reins something that you normally never have to inhibit, it just comes out naturally, right? There's no reason to pull it back. And so that's I think a very hard skill that one has to develop, and that's part of why it's so hard."

One thing that might help? Immersing yourself in the environment of the foreign language.

"You're creating a context in which you're strongly holding back this other language and you're getting a lot of practice holding back that other thing, so that gives room for the other (new) language to become stronger," says Goldrick.