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Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>
yahoo.com.cn>Re Linguist 14.1813 This story from the BBC, of which the relevant excerpt is given below, shows the perils of trying to interpret brain scan data of language use without a proper understanding of what is involved either in language learning or in the internal make-up of languages. Statements like "Mandarin is a notoriously difficult language to learn" are completely meaningless unless you specify "for who": Mandarin-speaking children? speakers of other tonal languages? The reseacher does go on later to specify that "Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin", but one suspects that this disclaimer was lost on the journalist, and on most readers. Other statements like the following - "Unlike English, [Mandarin] speakers use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of particular words. For instance, the word "ma" can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp depending on how it is said." are classic examples of language-specific bias. Why do we assume that there is "one word" ma which "changes" according to the tone? We might as well say, from the perspective of speakers of many Australian aboriginal languages which don't use voicing distinctively for stop consonants, that there is "one word" pet which English speakers bizarrely "change" into bed, bet etc. Not to mention the systematic stress alternation of noun-verb pairs in English like EXcerpt (noun) vs exCEPRT (verb) - and if that doesn't have anything to do with intonation I'll hang up my linguist's hat straight away! Behind all of this, of course, lies the assumption that changes in stricture and vowel aperture, as represented by the units of the English writing system, are somehow "basic" and that changes in pitch, mostly unrepresented by that writing system, are optional add-ons. Since no-one has yet identified a language which does not make use of pitch in a systematic way, either as part of the structure of the syllable - "tone" languages like Chinese or Thai - or of the word - "stress" languages like English or Swedish - or of larger units like the tone group - for example. French - this would seem to be, on the face of it, completely unscientific. Equally scientific is the idea that you can compare the brain scans of speakers of only two languages and be able to draw any sort of usable conclusions. Would we get similar results on African tonal languages? And I would be very interested as to how the experiment was carried out. Were speakers asked to say single words - in which case the pitch resources of English would be reduced to almost zero? As a long-time worker in the fields of Chinese linguistics and Chinese language teaching, this whole project reads to me like another ill-aimed attempt to "prove" that Chinese is somehow different from all other languages, though in practice English tends to be the default standard of comparison. The fact that such "exclusivism" is rampant in both those fields is one of the reasons why I fled some years ago to the comparative sanity of English departments, where such myth-making masquerading as science seems to be less prevalent. (Excerpt follows. The complete article can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3025796.stm) Chinese 'takes more brainpower' Speaking Chinese may take more brainpower than speaking English, a study suggests. Researchers in Britain have found that people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both sides of their brain to understand the language. This compares to English-language speakers who only need to use one side of their brain. The researchers said the findings could boost understanding of how the brain processes languages. This, in turn, could one day help scientists to develop better ways of helping people to re-learn languages after a stroke or similar damage to the brain. Brain scans Dr Sophie Scott and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust carried out brain scans on a group of Mandarin and English speakers. They found that the left temporal lobe, which is located by the left temple, becomes active when English speakers hear English. "People who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways." Dr Sophie Scott, Wellcome Trust The researchers believe that this area of the brain links speech sounds together to form individual words. They expected similar findings when they carried out scans on Mandarin speakers. However, they found that both their left and right temporal lobes become active when they hear Mandarin. "People who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways," said Dr Scott. "It overturned some long-held theories." Mandarin is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Unlike English, speakers use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of particular words. For instance, the word "ma" can mean mother, scold, horse or hemp depending on how it is said. The researchers believe that this need to interpret intonation is why Mandarin speakers need to use both sides of their brain. The right temporal lobe is normally associated with being able to process music or tones. "We think that Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken words," said Dr Scott. "It seems that the structure of the language you learn as a child affects how the structure of your brain develops to decode speech. "Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin." Dr Edward McDonald Department of Foreign Languages Tsinghua University Beijing 100084 PRC laomaa20023Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue