So we took advantage of this to look at what would be the difference if

we asked a group of Spanish native speakers to just track.

So they just had to see a noun and then decide is it masculine or feminine.

And we compared what happens when it's transparent, when the O or

A marks the gender and what happens when it's irregular or opaque?

Right, you can call it semi regular,

it's not completely irregular, it's semi regular.

We excluded things that were exception words like [FOREIGN]

[FOREIGN] which is another one, it's actually masculine.

So we excluded items like that, and

we only looked at items that were semi-regular.

And we asked, what would happen when people had to just decide what's

the gender, when we compared these transparents to these opaques.

And when we compared the opaques to the transparents, we got more activity in,

in native speakers, right,

as close to monolingual as we could get them in Southern California.

At the time, people had just been here, very little time, and been in the U.S.

very little time, and so, they were close to monolingual as we could get them.

And they showed brain activity in,

in, roughly three distinct areas in the brain within the frontal lobe.

Now, when we took the late

learners of Spansh And the English learners of Spanish.

We wanted to ask the same question, again would there be an increase for

these irregular items?

These semi regular items?

Do they show more brain activity?

And so we tested each group.

The Spanish natives who were better in English.

And the English natives who were better in English, and we tested them in Spanish.

And what we found was that one group showed activity in

a slightly superior area, what's called Broca's area,

generally thought to be involved in motor planning.

And a second group showed brain activity in a more inferior area

slightly below Broca's area.

That's thought to be involved in meaning.

Now, the interesting part, and

this is a speculation, but I'll let you know it is a speculation,

is that it might indicate to us what the differences are between these two groups.

So, for the early learners of Spanish.

Who didn't have as high a proficiency, right?

Because they were educated in English.

Somehow they were able to map the sound, right?

Or the motor plan to the gender.

But for the late learners of Spanish,

somehow that involved more meaning based retrieval.

Now, in behavior, the groups were identical.

So for those who are late learners of a language,

you could argue well if the behavior's identical should we really worry.

And I always tell people, you know, if you can create behavior

that's identical to someone who's a native speaker, don't worry about it.

Right. On the hand it

is interesting to think about how the brain arrives at that.

And because this language is learned as a second language,

it takes the existing structure of meaning in English and

adjusts it in some way to adapt to grammatical gender.

And it handles grammatical gender accurately, but

it's not like a native speaker, and that is also interesting.

One interesting side from this is other studies that have

looked at the semantic basis of gender.

This work done by Maria Sera.

She does a series of studies where she asks children to decide is a picture,

does it have a male voice or a female voice?

Which is a interesting thing.

How do you ask a child to give you grammatical gender?

And when she looked at English speaking children,

they actually do use some gender-based decisions.

Essentially things that are artifacts or

artificial, built by people, such as helicopters, they call those more male.

And things that are natural like trees and grass, they call more female.

But its not an absolute rule.

Its about a 60/40 rule.

Alright. So its not like anything absolute.

That's a rough tendency.

And if you look at Spanish-speaking children, they also, monolingual

Spanish-speaking children, they show a similar pattern, about a 60-40 split.

But then as they get older, these items start to get incorporated into

this grammatical gender and they start to use grammatical gender to place them,

such that now these items are judged as being masculine,

feminine based on what grammatical gender they have.

So there's this transition from a conceptual gender

to a grammatical gender in Spanish speaking children quite early.

For English speaking children, and into adulthood,

they have this semantic distinction, this meaning-based distinction.

So when in an 11-year-old, who has this meaning based distinction,

now suddenly encounters, or a 12-year-old or

15-year-old encounters this other grammatical system.

And remember that little kids in Spanish are splitting up [FOREIGN] as one thing,

[FOREIGN] as one thing, when they're really young.

All right, so

they've had all this grammatical training with gender from the natural world.

And now you have to take this meaning, which is part of, sort of based on

artifacts versus natural kinds and try to tweak it into this grammatical space,

it requires the brain to do other things.

And that's what we see in these adults.

It's an interesting aside it's a speculation we don't know if

that's exactly what adults do but that's what they report to us and

it fits in within other studies that have been done.

So one of the questions that people ask often is, should I learn

a language early or later in life, if I have that choice, which one should I take?

And the answer is, well, take whichever one you can, whenever you can.

But most importantly, be

mindful of the fact that each language and when it's learned will be different.

It will be different because early learning and

late learning are different due to the brain systems that

are available to learning at different points in development.

The brain is constantly changing across development and

what we find in the bilingual literature is that we can see both in the behavior,

right in the ability to produce accentless or

less accented speech, being biased by early learning.

But at the same time, there's the need for an extended period

of exposure to be able to acquire grammatical properties of a langauge.

So again, early and late learning are different.

And I think it's important to be mindful of this, and

realize that this difference does play a role in behavior and in brain activity.

But at the same time, to realize that our brains have an amazing ability to adapt

and incorporate things and adjust to things even later in life.

And in fact, when we get to the section on proficiency,

what'll become clearer is we'll realize that the ability to develop expertise and

proficiency in language does occur, even for some late learners which is

a fascinating side of things and one that we'll explore further in later sections.

3.9 Camparing First and Second Language

The Bilingual Brain

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