(Press-News.org) Over half the world's population speaks more than one language. But it's not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it.
Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the new paper with her colleagues, Walter J.B. van Heuven and Kathy Conklin. She wanted to study how two different languages are stored in the bilingual brain. "If you read in English, you don't really require your knowledge of Chinese. Do you switch it off?" Earlier research in European languages found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and French or Spanish and Italian, have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary. That's not true for English and Chinese.
The subjects in Zhang's experiments were all Chinese students at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. For the study, each person was shown pairs of words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly that the person didn't realize they'd seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real word as quickly as possible. This was just a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.
The trick was this: Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection – but only if you know how they're written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be "thing," which is written 东西in Chinese, and the second might be "west," which is written 西in Chinese. The character for "west" appears in the word "thing," but these two words are totally unrelated in English.
Zhang found that, when two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster – even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.
"As long as I can speak English to you, why would you care what my brain is doing in terms of Chinese?" Zhang asks. In daily life, it doesn't matter; it's just good enough that she can talk to the people around her. But she says understanding the way languages are linked in the brain could someday help people learn second languages. "When people learn two languages, they automatically make the link between them. We would like to find out how the link between the two languages influences language processing."
###
For more information about this study, please contact: Taoli Zhang at lpxtz@nottingham.ac.uk.
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Fast automatic translation and morphological decomposition in Chinese-English bilinguals" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or dmenon@psychologicalscience.org.
Fluent English speakers translate into Chinese automatically
2011-06-15
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Prostate cancer gets around hormone therapy by activating a survival cell signaling pathway
2011-06-15
Cancer is crafty. When one avenue driving its growth is blocked by drugs targeting that path, the malignancy often creates a detour, finding an alternative route to get around the roadblock.
In a study at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, researchers found that when a common type of prostate cancer was treated with conventional hormone ablation therapy blocking androgen production or androgen receptor (AR) function– which drives growth of the tumor – the cancer was able to adapt and compensate by activating a survival cell signaling pathway, effectively circumventing ...
Protecting medical implants from attack
2011-06-15
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people receive them every year. Most such devices have wireless connections, so that doctors can monitor patients' vital signs or revise treatment programs. But recent research has shown that this leaves the devices vulnerable to attack: In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could kill a victim by instructing an implantable device to deliver lethal doses of medication or electricity.
At the Association ...
Forecast: Tough times ahead for daily deal sites
2011-06-15
Over the next few years, it is likely that daily deal sites will have to settle for lower shares of revenues from businesses compared with their current levels, and it will be harder and more expensive for them to find viable candidates to fill their pipelines of daily deals, according to Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. In his third study – the most exhaustive study done to date on the daily deals industry – Dholakia found that there is very little difference between companies in the ever-expanding ...
Out of reach? Rural elders have highest rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease
2011-06-15
Despite living in the countryside, where open space is plentiful and there is often significant agricultural production, California's more than half a million rural elders are far more likely to be overweight or obese, physically inactive and food insecure than their suburban counterparts, according to a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
All three conditions are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and repeated falls — conditions also more prevalent among rural elders.
Approximately 710,000 Californians aged 65 and over live in ...
AARP reports on an Oregon creation to help patients with advanced illness: the Polst Program
2011-06-15
PORTLAND, Ore. -- An Oregon-pioneered program aimed at improving health care for those with advanced illness is now receiving national attention. AARP recently released a report about the Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, or POLST, program. The program was created to honor the treatment wishes of patients with advanced progressive illness or frailty.
The AARP report titled, "Improving Advanced Illness Care: The Evolution of State POLST Programs," examines the evolution of POLST which, to date, has been implemented in at least 12 states. The report can ...
Salivating over wheat plants may net Hessian flies big meal or death
2011-06-15
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The interaction between a Hessian fly's saliva and the wheat plant it is attacking may be the key to whether the pest eats like a king or dies like a starving pauper, according to a study done at Purdue University.
"The insect induces or suppresses susceptibility in the plant," said Christie Williams, a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and a Purdue associate professor of entomology. "It's not that the fly larva is making holes and retrieving nutrients as once thought. The larva is doing something ...
JAMA study points to patient safety risks outside hospital walls
2011-06-15
NEW YORK (June 15, 2011) -- Ever since the Institute of Medicine issued its landmark report "To Err Is Human" in 1999, significant attention has been paid to improving patient safety in hospitals nationwide.
However, a high number of adverse events, including major injury and even death, occur in private physician offices and outpatient clinics as well. In a new study -- the first of its kind -- researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College found that the number and magnitude of events resulting from medical errors is surprisingly similar inside and outside hospital walls.
Published ...
New insights on how solar minimums affect Earth
2011-06-15
Since 1611, humans have recorded the comings and goings of black spots on the sun. The number of these sunspots wax and wane over approximately an 11-year cycle -- more sunspots generally mean more activity and eruptions on the sun and vice versa. The number of sunspots can change from cycle to cycle and 2008 saw the longest and weakest solar minimum since scientists have been monitoring the sun with space-based instruments.
Observations have shown, however, that magnetic effects on Earth due to the sun, effects that cause the aurora to appear, did not go down in synch ...
Van Andel Research Institute finding is potential predictor of deadly cancer common in Asia
2011-06-15
Grand Rapids, Mich. (June 14, 2011) – In a study recently published in Cancer Research, Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) researchers found a protein that could help predict the spread of the head and neck cancer nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC); this protein could also serve as part of a treatment strategy to stop the spread of the disease.
Though uncommon in the United States, NPC is one of the most common malignant tumors in southern China and Southeast Asia with incidence rates nearly 25 times that of most of the rest of the world. VARI researchers worked with scientists ...
Too close for comfort? Maybe not
2011-06-15
Philadelphia, PA, June 15, 2011 – People generally worry about who their neighbors are, especially neighbors of our children. If high-fat food and soda are nearby, people will imbibe, and consequently gain weight. Or will they? With students' health at risk, a study in the July/August 2011 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior explores the influence food store locations near schools has on the student risk of being overweight and student fast-food and sweetened beverage consumption.
Investigators from the University of Southern Maine surveyed 552 students ...