Neurological Differences in Language Learning

On a related topic - when I first told my husband I was going to learn Mandarin, and then mentioned that I was finding it fairly easy to do, we talked about tonal languages and music. I'm a musician, and when I was a research assistant one of the tests I gave folks was on tones. I found the results of various test subjects, which often seemed to correlate with the subjects' ethnicity, interesting. I wasn't surprised to find that often, subjects from an Asian background scored higher on the tone test than subjects from other ethnicities. When I had taken the test myself, I also scored much higher on the test than most non-Asian based subjects. When I mentioned this to my husband, he cited some DNA studies (wish I knew which ones, now) that had shown that subjects with Asian backgrounds - regardless of their environmental learning - scored higher in tone tests. I've meant to do some searching online for more information on such studies, but I haven't gotten around to it, yet...

melitu -- yup! ;-) benson -- I missed your post above, sorry. It doesn't surprise me at all that you find even simple adverts, notices and signs opaque. Because "written" forms tend to be a bit closer to Classical Chinese (文言; wen2yan2 !!!) in terms of syntax and vocabulary. So you would see more characters such as 勿 (wu4) or 禁 (jin4), 所 (suo3) or 寻 (xun2), used as complete, standalone verbs/ particles, much like in Classical Chinese. In spoken Mandarin, such characters are usually paired with other characters to form compound words. So for what it's worth, I think your aptitude for Chinese is not in question....

The article implies that for someone who only listens to podcasts to learn a language (without any visual input), a female cpod user would fair better than a male cpod user. Like tvan, I'm not sure I buy into the whole genetic advantage being that great of a difference in the eventual outcome. But for cpod, it doesn't hurt to have a variety of tools using different senses to supplement the podcasts. For example, having another type of sentence completion... an entirely auditory one (vs. the entirely visual one now)... or mixing visual and auditory. Not entirely related to the article, but one thing that would be nice to see in learning vocab is having the capability to add a picture "definition" (so as to not have to switch to English) or a definition entirely in Chinese. What if the user can choose on a per tag (or maybe even per word) basis... English, picture, or Chinese definition? Just throwing something out there =) julesong - Your comment reminded of an article I came across recently about only one side of the brain becoming active when English speakers hear English but both sides of the brain being used when people hear and decode Mandarin (which may be due to it being a tonal language)... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3025796.stm

Hi. For what it's worth, in my family there is a Stunt Toddler whose home language background (Peranakan Chinese + Filipino) doesn't include any Chinese whatosever, apart from the 20 minutes or so of Cantonese that he gets to spend with our nonagenarian Cantonese-speaking Amah, maybe three or four days out of every week. I decided early on not to speak my (horrible, non-native) Mandarin to him because I figured that he'd be better off hearing only "good" Mandarin! Stunt Toddler was enrolled in pre-school early -- barely squeaked in at 30 months and 3 days, he's the youngest in his class -- because it had a bilingual programme. It's a genuine bilingual programme, the kind where there are two teachers in the classroom at all times, and BOTH of them are bilinguals. After two months, S.T. has begun to wow us by spouting Mandarin, and being really comfortable with tones, which he certainly does not pick up outside of school (his parents and their friends only speak English or Tagalog). I don't get the feeling that genes have anything to do with that. Rather, I think that his introduction to Mandarin was made easier by the fact that, although we never even tried to raise him bilingually (vis-a-vis English and Mandarin; Tagalog is another matter), we used to give him a lot of tone practice by playing games where we would make up say Cantonese words in "funny" accents, and he would repeat them. Early exposure to tones (any tones) may be a good way to equip somebody to tackle other tonal languages. I was surprised not to experience any problems with Thai tones when I took up that language as an adult; the rules are not the same as in Chinese, but the "tone changes" were not a problem. Guess now I have to try and study a non-Asian tonal language -- eg. Twi or Ewe or Lakota -- to test this inference!

If one did accept the idea that gender is a factor in language learning, what are the practical implications? Do you "encourage" us guys to learn languages? (Ala the U.S. encouraging girls in math.) Do you structure the lessons differently? Or do you just accept the difference as a scientific curiosity and move on?

Some articles regarding neurology and linguistics: That one should be interesting for julesong: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000AF8AE-D1DD-118F-91DD83414B7F0000 "A new study concludes that young musicians who speak Mandarin Chinese can learn to identify isolated musical notes much better than English speakers can. Fewer than one American in 10,000 has absolute pitch, which means they can identify or produce a note without reference to any other note. Also called perfect pitch, this skill requires distinguishing sounds that differ by just 6 percent in frequency." http://huehueteotl.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/learning-a-second-language-a-problem-of-modern-phrenology/ www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/~wsywang/publications/chinese_lang.pdf http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~s0340638/tonegenes/tonegenessummary.html Now, about gender differences...I doubt there's a huge difference. See - I'm female, but as an engineer if I couldn't think in patterns and mathematically, I'd be living on welfare. I have a male colleague(43) who speaks 12 languages fluently. So what?, you might ask, these may be isolated cases. Of course, there are differences in language acquisition. But whether these are significant enough to have an impact on teaching is doubtful. Why on earth would stuff like that coded in our DNA anyway? (Evolution? Well, what's the advantage of being able to learn tones well?) "a female cpod user would fair better than a male cpod user." Again, that might be true of some, but whether that means 60% of women or 90%, science has yet to determine. I belong to the other 40-10%, audio helps me to improve my listening skills (duh!) but does not really increase my fluency. Perfect pitch? I'd love to have that one. (Guess that makes me sound like Sylar. I've been watching way to much Heroes lately. But after all, the episodes had Chinese subs, to at least it was educational.) Anyway, that's a curiosity: I absolutely cannot discern between (musical) tones. I had 12 years of Music education at school, but I have no clue how to distinguish between an A and a G. However, Mandarin and Thai tones are a piece of cake for me. Don't take me too seriously. I've just finished writing two papers (about 120 pages each) on some dumb capacitors. I need some recreation. Off to the Intermediate section...

Thanks for the interesting articles, depredadora! I don't buy the study mentioned in Scientific American though... perfect pitch of English speakers vs. Mandarin speakers. Problem 1: Nature... what if the perfect pitch was due to a genetic difference? Problem 2: The cultural aspect... children in China have less freedom to choose to pursue their interests (second-hand info from my cousins who grew up in China). Chinese musical students are then more likely to have shown some musical talent (perfect pitch?) at an early age before pursuing music, which would already bias the sample here. All the study says is that Chinese music students in China have a greater number of people who have perfect pitch than music students in the US. Causes? Could be a number of factors. I know a lot of American-Born-Chinese who speak Mandarin... perfect pitch doesn't seem to be anymore prevalent in that group... though it's a pretty small sample size =) In the end, what we do know is that everyone learns differently (language included) and people need to figure out what works best for them. As long as cpod offers a number of different ways to learn the language, people can pick their methods. And if there's something missing, someone will probably mention it. One thing that is helpful for acquiring language though... not having to constantly map English <-> Chinese... why I mentioned adding the ability tack pictures to vocab in my previous post.

I agree with your assessment of the validity of the studies findings. However, "Nature... what if the perfect pitch was due to a genetic difference?" : There have been conducted several studies, incidentally published in SA as well (I spend approximately 4 hours a day in the uni library, I come across this kinda stuff on a regular basis) that investigate a correlation between genes and language preference (whether you're predisposed to acquiring tonal or non-tonal languages easier), explaining the issue quite clearly (even for non-geneticists). If only I could find them... Two random thoughts thrown in just for good measure: what's the likelihood of actually mixing up tonal and non-tonal languages? (One of my gems was "Wo juede que this sería un problema." - admittedly said after my ph.d. thesis defense. English and Castellano being my native languages.) And has anyone learning Chinese experienced a change in their accent ? That's happened to me. That said, picking up accents is kinda my thing. (I can annoy my contemporaries with a thick Irish or Texan accent.) But why on earth would I suddenly start contemplating tones when speaking English? Perhaps I'm just weird. By the way, speaking of tones: "a female cpod user would fair better than a male cpod user." I had to read the sentence three times until i realized why it was slightly peculiar: Instead of "be" being missing, "fare" got confused with "fair". Bloody homonyms ;-) If you spot any mistakes, feel free to blame my excessive caffeine consumption.

melitu said: "One thing that is helpful for acquiring language though... not having to constantly map English <-> Chinese... why I mentioned adding the ability tack pictures to vocab..." I completely agree with you! I think most of us would agree that an image is worth a thousand words. A "Match The Correct Word To The Image" exercise would be very beneficial. It'd also be easy to do within the flash-based exercise model. Of course, there'd be an additional cost for stock photos, and the photos may take up precious server space, but I think the pros would outweigh the cons. CPod, is this something that could be looked into, if it isn't already?

Personally I find both methods to be helpful. However most defiantly I'd say I'm more audio. One thing I'd like to add is that writing or any form of 'tactile" learning has almost a negative effect on my remembering it or usage. I find doing the exercise portion of Chinese pod to be really annoying and it feels as though it brings little gain to learning. The only exception I can find is text messaging in Chinese is great! This however is just me! -许尘

My wife is Cantonese and, due to her father's political affiliation spent her childhood in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Taiwan and, eventually, the United States. Consequently, she speaks Thai, Laotian (close to Thai), three dialects of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, & C潮州), Vietnamese and English, all learned between the ages of four and eight. Certainly, age had quite a bit to do with it. But gender? Her two brothers speak every language she does. Maybe there's some genetic advantage; but I put it mostly down to nurture.

I grew up in the US during the era when the "Let the rest of 'em speak English" attitude prevailed in politics and pedagogy such that learning languages rated below typing and wood shop for practical utility (or so we students were advised). I learned a little Spanish in junior high school and a little French in college, then lived and worked pretty much mono-lingually until coming to China at age 53 as an English teacher. I've been learning Chinese and found, to my surprise, long forgotten Spanish and French words emerging from the recesses of my brain when I'm struggling to conjure up the appropriate Chinese words. Anyone else have this experience? Maybe if I study Spanish again my Chinese recall will improve????

lol. xiang234. The same thing happens to me. I took French all through high school then took Spanish in college and the two would always mix together. These days, Chinese has taken the place of French in my brain with Spanish as a close second. I'm presently trying to learn some Korean and it's getting pretty crowded in there! I read an article in the NYTimes that talked about brain mapping and language acquisition. This probably explains why: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E1DB1438F936A25754C0A961958260

Thanks for the NYT article, which made a lot of sense to me. Everything that I've read -- as a layman -- on the subject of language acquisition/ bilingualism/ multilingualism seems to tell me that early exposure to more than one language sort of "primes" the language processing part of the brain to become more efficient at handling different languages. Meaning, early exposure to -- say Cantonese and English and Malay -- may actually have made it easier for me to learn French later in life, a language which I never heard before the age of 13. Once again, thanks!

And there is no scientific basic whatsoever for my saying this, but: My instincts tell me that an early childhood environment which develops that part of the brain which is devoted to processing different languages, making sense of them, and keeping them untangled, may even build up enough pathways for that person to learn additional languages later in life, as "first languages", rather than as "second languages". The research in this area is fascinating. I wonder to what extend, if at all, the studies mentioned in earlier posts on -- say -- "musicality" took into account the fact that many ethnic Chinese actually grow up in a bilingual environment. Fact is, given the vast geographical (and linguistic) spread of China, most Chinese babies, even in China, grow up listening to two "home" languages -- the local dialect at home (or at least, with the grandparents), and standard Mandarin -- or the standard form of some other dominant dialect -- in school. Just wondering...

Does anyone know how the brain works when acquiring Chinese (character) vocab, and if certain types of people are disadvantaged in this respect? If so, what are the workarounds, short-cuts, mental handles, weakness cover-ups, etc? Cos after many years of study, and having achieved an upper-intermediate to advanced listening level and very 标准 pronunciation (if I do say so myself!), reading simple advertisements, notices and signs has still got me good, and sometimes I feel like maybe my brain just isn't configured to learn Chinese characters. Can anyone extend me a ray of hope?

I don't quite buy the whole neaurological gender difference. In my school class, some of the girls seem very into pictures and some of the boys don't care. But obviously, the more different approaches there are available, the more people you can reach, for whatever reason. Personally I find that pictures can help to wean me off translations very well. And when I first learn a word or phrase, having the transcript, to look at the character, is invaluable. But I can also learn effectively through audio, and I do tend to think of language fairly abstractly. So I'm not sure the gender thing seems to fit with my experience. I'm very happy with the services CPod currently offers, although more is never a bad thing. =]

calkins, I didn't realize one could italize text in the forum... I'll have to try it... depredadora said: Bloody homonyms Oops, I didn't notice until you pointed the fair/fare out... I blame it on typing fast, which results in losing or mixing up words here and there =) Too bad there's no edit (or preview before submit) button. I've read that the mixing up of two languages should mostly go away after learning both to a fairly fluent level. I guess the brain just grabs at whatever's easiest in terms of "language(s) I'm learning". I wonder if there's some research to back this up or physical explanation for it. The NYT article... I'd be interested in knowing what happens when those bilingual kids learn a third language as an adult... where does that language then reside? In the same set of neurons as the first two, or in another set entirely on its own? auntie68, I'll take your instincts as motivation (placebo or not) that my language studies are easier than they would be otherwise =) benson, have you tried an SRS (spaced repetition system/software) for remembering the characters? anki is one that I like (and free). Though I've never tried them, there's also Mnemosyne (free), Supermemo (fairly inexpensive), and others.

xiang234- So its not just me! I get heaps of Indonesian words come back to me in Chinese class. Indonesian doesn't even sound at all like Chinese. I wasn't even that good at remembering words when i did Indonesian.

melitu, thanks for that article. Very interesting. Explains why it's so difficult for those of us with no tonal language background to get the tones.