This document discusses the brain's role in acquiring multiple languages. It describes the main parts of the brain and how different regions are associated with various functions like vision, speech, and memory. The document then compares the brains of polyglots who speak many languages to monolinguals. While early studies found differences in brain structures, it remains unclear if these are innate or develop through language learning. Research shows multilingual brains have distinct neural activity patterns and are more efficient at focusing on relevant information. Bilinguals can switch between the typical thought patterns of each of their languages, demonstrating flexibility. The document debates the extent to which language shapes thought and discusses theories of language acquisition.

1. Languages a question of brain
By: Lic. Kelly Ferny Sanlo

2. Languages a question of brain
Introduction:
 Brain has a powerful memory and a powerful structure, it means that the more
you are motivated the more you will acquire any skill of your interest.
 For years scientist have been investigated the brain of humans that have the skill
of speaking over five languages in many different ways, so they have the clue
because there are more people demonstrating that those theories are
convincing.

3. The brain
 The brain is made of three main parts: the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain.
The forebrain consists of the cerebrum, thalamus, and hypothalamus (part of the
limbic system). The midbrain consists of the tectum and tegmentum. The
hindbrain is made of the cerebellum, pons and medulla. Often the midbrain,
pons, and medulla are referred to together as the brainstem.

4. Functions
 Frontal Lobe- associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement,
emotions, and problem solving
 Parietal Lobe- associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of
stimuli
 Occipital Lobe- associated with visual processing
 Temporal Lobe- associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli,
memory, and speech

5. Differences between people who does speak
many languages to people who only speaks
one
 One of the most famous hyperpolyglots in history was Emil Krebs, a 19th century
German diplomat who, by some accounts, had mastered 65 languages by the
time of his death. In 2004, scientists had the opportunity to dissect Krebs’s brain
in an effort to confirm whether his impressive language skills were due to a
unique brain structure. While they observed distinct differences in the region of
Krebs’s brain responsible for language — known as Broca’s area — they were
ultimately unable to answer whether his unique brain was different since birth or
if it grew to be that way from learning so many new languages

6.  Today, we know multilinguals and hyperpolyglots have distinct differences in their
brains’ neural activity when compared to people who can only speak one language.
This is because the human brain is a highly adaptive organ. Any type of cognitive
activity, whether it’s doing a puzzle, playing an instrument, or learning a language,
can build new neural pathways.
 Language learning in particular creates new pathways that not only strengthen the
brains of multilingual individuals but also facilitate further language learning. In a
2014 experiment, for example, brain scans showed people who spoke only one
language had to work harder to focus on a single word. Ellen Bialystok, a
psychologist at York University in Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the study, told
LiveScience this happened because multilingual brains are more efficient at tuning
out irrelevant information.

7.  Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question
in German. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Speakers
of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences,
influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. The work also
finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more
flexible.
 Cognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you think
since the 1940s. The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number of
studies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certain
features of the world. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than
English speakers, for example. And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by material
rather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Still,
skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect cultural
differences between speakers that are unrelated to language.

8.  In the new study, researchers turned to people who speak multiple languages. By
studying bilinguals, “we’re taking that classic debate and turning it on its head,” says
psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
Rather than ask whether speakers of different languages have different minds, he says,
“we ask, ‘Can two different minds exist within one person?’
 Athanasopoulos and colleagues were interested in a particular difference in how English
and German speakers treat events. English has a grammatical toolkit for situating
actions in time: "I was sailing to Bermuda and I saw Elvis” is different from "I sailed to
Bermuda and I saw Elvis.” German doesn’t have this feature. As a result, German
speakers tend to specify the beginnings, middles, and ends of events, but English
speakers often leave out the endpoints and focus in on the action. Looking at the same
scene, for example, German speakers might say, “A man leaves the house and walks to
the store,” whereas an English speaker would just say, “A man is walking.”

9.  This linguistic difference seems to influence how speakers of the two languages
view events, according to the new study. Athanasopoulos and colleagues asked 15
native speakers of each language to watch a series of video clips that showed
people walking, biking, running, or driving. In each set of three videos, the
researchers asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a
woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-
oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman
walks down a country lane). German speakers matched ambiguous scenes with
goal-oriented scenes about 40% of the time on average, compared with 25%
among English speakers. This difference implies that German speakers are more
likely to focus on possible outcomes of people’s actions, but English speakers pay
more attention to the action itself.

10.  Bilingual speakers, meanwhile, seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the
language most active in their minds. The researchers found that 15 Germans fluent in English were
just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. But
a similar group of 15 German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were just
as action-focused as native English speakers. This change could also be seen as an effect of culture,
but a second experiment showed that bilinguals can also switch perspectives as fast as they can
switch languages.
 In another group of 30 German-English bilinguals, the researchers kept one language busy during
the video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in either
English or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of the
other language to the fore. When researchers “blocked” English, subjects acted like typical Germans
and saw ambiguous videos as more goal-oriented. With German blocked, bilingual subjects acted
like English speakers and matched ambiguous and open-ended scenes. When the researchers
surprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through the
experiment, the subjects’ focus on goals versus process switched right along with it.

11.  The results suggest that a second language can play an important unconscious role
in framing perception, the authors conclude online this month in Psychological
Science. “By having another language, you have an alternative vision of the world,”
Athanasopoulos says. “You can listen to music from only one speaker, or you can
listen in stereo … It’s the same with language.”
 “This is an important advance,” says cognitive scientist Phillip Wolff of Emory
University in Atlanta who wasn’t connected to the study. “If you’re a bilingual
speaker, you’re able to entertain different perspectives and go back and forth,” he
says. “That really hasn’t been shown before.”

12.  But researchers who doubt that language plays a central role in thinking are likely
to remain skeptical. The artificial laboratory setting may make people rely on
language more than they normally would, says cognitive psychologist Barbara Malt
of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “In a real-world situation, I could
find reasons to pay attention to the continuity of an action and other reasons
where I would pay attention to the endpoint,” she says. “Nothing says I have to be
a bilingual to do that … It doesn’t mean language is the lens through which I see
the world.”
 Posted in: Brain & Behavior, Social Sciences

13. Ways of learning
 The brain is the main author for each one, as far as I am concerned there are
many theories that can explain what is happening in our acquisition of any
language but for each person there is a theory, I am trying to say that each
person is an independent individual that has its way to acquire any knowledge
for instance there are people who learn languages just at hearing, there are
people who born with the ability of languages (Chomsky´s theory), there are
people who learn languages by context, by interact with others ( Vygotsky's
theory) and there are people who learn languages because they want to learn
and they have the motivation of learning.

14. The ability of adquiring languages
My own experience
 I remember when I was a child I used to listen my grandmother talking in
Papiamento so at that age I received that input and I have the ability of
understand that language, then when I was like 9 years old I listened to my uncle
and my aunt talking in English and I got the ability of pronounce words in English
in an excellent way, so I grow up with the ability of learning languages.
 In some years later those abilities were increasing by studying with the
motivation of learning any of those language I consider interesting: English,
French and German without taking into account my mother tongue which is
Spanish; acquiring this one as natural way to understand and growing up in an
environment which the main language is Spanish.

15. Conclusion
 According to those theories and in agreement with all the things I mentioned
before, languages are a question of brain so we have a great structure in our
brain that can deal with an amazing ability of learning not only languages but
also another things we are interesting in.
 We can also mention that a motivated person is a machine of creativity and a
leader of its own future of success.

16. Bibliography
 Brain Structures and their Functions © by Serendip 1994-2017
 Differences between people who does speak many languages to people who
only speaks one Brain & Behavior, Social Sciences