Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  Or Roger could recognize that low-road transfer won’t help much in this case, chalk it up to experience, and not let it keep him from actively seeking opportunities to use his German on the rest of the trip, keeping in mind that learning German is a process, not an outcome.

  But here’s Roger again a few years later at a family reunion in Germany. This was a large gathering of distant relatives, and they were delighted that one of their American cousins was able to attend. The German typically taught in the United States is called High German (Hochdeutsch), which is the standard dialect. Therefore, Roger had studied only High German in high school and college. The family reunion, however, took place in a small city near the Dutch border. In that area, Plattdeutsch, or “Low” German is the native dialect, although everyone is also familiar with the standard dialect.

  At first, Roger was encouraged by his successful efforts to make small talk with family members at the breakfast table. In hindsight, however, these interactions were a sham: his hosts took pains to speak the standard dialect slowly and to use basic vocabulary. When these relatives were catching up with each other at the reunion, however, they were off to the races. They would occasionally interrupt their steady stream of excited chatter with guilty looks in Roger’s direction, and would remind each other with the phrase Immer Hoch! to use the standard dialect. However, they would soon forget and lapse into Low German. Unfortunately, Roger didn’t realize that when his relatives used the local dialect it was an excellent opportunity for him to take advantage of high-road transfer. He missed the chance to look for similarities between the German he had studied and the German he was hearing. As his relatives switched back and forth between German dialects, the differences he perceived in vowel pronunciation, word choice, and other linguistic features could have been applied to his future German studies. And, at a pragmatic level, Roger missed out on the opportunity to engage his family in a conversation about German dialects that he would have found both fascinating and instructive.

  Of course, low-road and high-road transfer will both be useful in foreign language learning. However, since most foreign language students are already familiar with low-road transfer, actively creating opportunities for mindful, high-road transfer between one’s native language and the target language will be time well spent. The main point about transfer, however, is not to be like Sheldon—afraid to get in the water. Dive in—even if you have to wear water wings.

  Metaphors and Idioms: A Free Ride or a Sticky Wicket?

  Acquiring a second language presents us with many seemingly daunting challenges. We have to learn a different grammatical system. We have to master or at least approximate sounds that do not exist in our native tongue. We have to absorb the vocabulary of the foreign language, or at least several hundred words of it. Everything seems different. But in fact, one major aspect remains the same, and this is the conceptual structure that all languages share. We may need to learn that dog is el perro in Spanish, or kutya in Hungarian, or inu in Japanese, but the concept of “dog” remains unchanged. From a Mexican Chihuahua to a Hungarian Vizsla to a Japanese Akita, the collection of entities that this term includes (and does not include) is the same as in your native language. At its heart, a language is a shorthand for describing one’s experiences, and since humans physically perceive the world in roughly the same way, most concepts are roughly equivalent. The ways in which this shorthand is expressed will vary widely, but a universal conceptual grounding abides.

  You can leverage this conceptual core in many ways as you study a new language. It can, for example, help you make sense of metaphorical relationships. A metaphor, in case you’re rusty with rhetorical terms, is simply a comparison between two things. The road was a snake as it wound through the mountains would be an example. The term metaphor is used when the comparison is implicit, as in the previous sentence, while simile refers to an explicit comparison, as in The road was like a snake.

  A great deal of language, it turns out, is metaphorical. Sometimes this is obvious, as in the snake example, but often it is not. Cognitive scientists talk about metaphors as existing on a continuum of novelty, and at one end, many such expressions have become “frozen” in a given language. In English, we routinely refer to the face and hands of a clock, or the arms and legs of a chair, without even realizing that we are using the parts of the human body to describe the parts of other objects. And even more importantly for our purposes here, these metaphors tend not to exist in a vacuum.

  The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson argued for the existence of entire metaphorical conceptual systems in their classic work Metaphors We Live By. They proposed that many linguistic expressions are based on particular conceptual metaphors, such as “Time is money” (He spent the hour in the library profitably), or “High status is up” (She’s climbing the ladder of success). One of the richest examples of this argument is the conceptual metaphor “Love is a journey.” There are dozens of familiar expressions that are unified by this conceptual core, and they run the gamut of emotions we experience in a close relationship. Consider the following:

  Look how far we’ve come.

  We’ve gotten off track.

  We’ll just have to go our separate ways.

  We can’t turn back now.

  We’re at a crossroads.10

  Seen in this light, it becomes clear that linguistic expressions may not be as arbitrary as they first appear. And this insight should provide you with some optimism about acquiring these seemingly disparate phrases in your new language.

  Since we’ve been looking at metaphors concerning love, let’s continue in this vein and consider some cross-linguistic examples. Many languages conceptually map emotions onto parts of the body, as in to break someone’s heart. It would be discouraging indeed if this idea were expressed totally differently in different languages. Imagine if Germans referred to this as slapping someone’s forehead, while Russians made reference to punching someone’s shoulder. Fortunately, across a variety of languages, the phrase is the same or recognizably similar. Germans speak of jemandem das Herz brechen, and the Russian expression maps equivalently as well. There are minor variations: Greeks would say that one “tears the heart,” while speakers of Japanese would refer to this as “a thorn in the heart.” In Spanish, there is still the act of breaking, but it’s the soul instead of the heart.11 Clearly, there is enough similarity here to be able to figure out such expressions when they are encountered.

  Does this mean that we’re home free? Unfortunately, there is another side to this issue of linguistic mappings, and it has to do with idiomatic expressions. Whereas metaphors wear their hearts on their sleeves (if you’ll pardon the expression), the mappings for idioms are often more opaque. A good example of this in English would be the euphemisms we use to talk about death. We might refer to someone as pushing up daisies or having bought the farm, but now the correspondence seems to be arbitrary. Nothing about daisies or farms seems to connect to death in a straightforward way, and so legions of students learning English have simply been instructed to learn such expressions by rote. They are what they are.

  This notion, however, has been challenged by the cognitive scientist Ray Gibbs. He has pointed out that even relatively opaque idiomatic expressions may have a broader conceptual basis. Consider, for example, the ways in which we talk about someone becoming extremely angry:

  Blow your stack.

  Flip your lid.

  Hit the ceiling.

  His pent-up anger welled up inside him.

  The common element in these idioms is a conceptual mapping of anger as heated fluid within a container.12

  Obviously, not every such mapping works: it would sound odd, at least in English, to say that a deceased person is pushing up petunias or has purchased the plantation. This nonproductivity, as researchers refer to it, is why certain expressions are labeled as metaphoric, whereas others are idiomatic. A road can be like a snake, or like spaghetti, or like anything else that
can be bent or twisted. Idioms are said to be frozen either because the conceptual mapping has been lost over time or never existed in the first place.

  The important point is to recommend that you take a step back and think about the conceptual mappings of metaphors and idioms in your target language, which can help you to organize and remember those that you’re learning.13 There will be many cases in which these mappings won’t work, but if you are alert to the possibilities of conceptual mappings, you can once again take advantage of what your native language has provided you for free. In addition, by learning the new conceptual mappings of your target culture, you will be able to use the language far more eloquently.

  7

  Making Memories …

  The Workings of Working Memory

  Have you ever wondered about the length of telephone numbers? When the engineers working for the Bell Telephone Company created the modern phone system in the 1950s, they had to consider a variety of factors. If the numbers were too short, there wouldn’t be enough of them to go around. If they were too long, people would make mistakes when they used them. (Remember that this was when calling someone meant repeatedly turning a dial with your index finger. It could take several seconds to dial a number, so mistakes were costly in terms of time wasted.) Most importantly, however, if the numbers were too long, people wouldn’t be able to remember them. But how long is too long?

  Let’s try a little memory experiment. Before reading any further, hand this book to a family member or friend, and ask her to follow the instructions shown below:

  Please read the following numbers out loud. Speak the numbers at a rate of about four per second, and try to keep the pauses between each number the same length:

  3 7 2 9 5 8 1 6 0 2 7 4

  Immediately after you finish, ask that the numbers be repeated out loud. Now hand the book back (and thank you!).

  This is called a digit span task. Chances are, you weren’t able to repeat the entire twelve-digit sequence. Most people are able to remember the first few numbers, but then, somewhere around the middle of the list, their memory collapses like a house of cards. Whatever the span of one’s memory is, it seems to be fewer than twelve numbers.

  Cognitive scientists have made use of this digit span test for a variety of purposes, but we’ll just focus on estimates of its size for now. George Miller, who was in fact one of the very first cognitive scientists, famously referred to the number of items that can be held in memory as “the magical number seven, plus or minus two.”1 And in fact, the engineers at Bell Labs made use of Miller’s research when they decided that seven digits offered the best balance between phone number length and people’s memory limitations.

  But just as some people claim that age is simply a number, it turns out that digit span is rather arbitrary as well. A moment ago, you probably failed in your attempt to recall a twelve-digit number that you’d just heard. Now we’re going to give you another twelve-digit number, and ask you to recall it. And we confidently predict that you’ll do much better with this one (here’s a hint: think about dates from history):

  1 4 9 2 1 7 7 6 2 0 0 1

  How did you do? If you realized that this twelve-digit sequence is composed of the years of three important events in American history, then you could think about it as:

  1492, 1776, and 2001

  This sequence isn’t just a meaningless string of digits. The first four digits are also the year of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the second four correspond to the year America declared independence from Britain, and the final four will always be connected with the year of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

  This would seem to contradict Miller’s claim that the normal amount of information we can remember using the digit span task is seven, or nine at most. However, think about what you did for this second example: instead of passively listening to your friend, as in the first case, you imposed meaning on the numbers. And this makes all the difference. Miller called this chunking. So one’s digit span isn’t seven plus or minus two items; it’s seven plus or minus two chunks. In his paper, Miller provided an elegant simile: short-term memory (as measured by digit span) is like a purse that can hold seven coins. However, the coins can be copper, or they can be gold.

  If you think about chunking, then, phone numbers aren’t really seven numbers long. This is because area codes are meaningful, not just random. For example, in the television show Seinfeld, Elaine was upset because she wanted to keep the traditional Manhattan area code of 202, rather than one of the newer numbers. For Elaine, and others, the area code 202 means Manhattan. So if an area code is thought of as one meaningful chunk, instead of three separate numbers, then even telephone numbers with area codes are still comfortably within a normal person’s digit span ability of five to nine chunks.

  Digit span is important for our purposes because it provides a way of measuring a person’s short-term or working memory. And working memory is a key component of language comprehension. Spoken language isn’t produced all at once: a speaker articulates words one by one over time, until his thought is complete. And when we read, our eyes jump from point to point on a line of text as we decode the words individually or in groups. In either case, it’s essential to hang on to the first part of a sentence until the last words are encountered.

  Working memory size is affected by many factors, such as intelligence (people with higher IQs perform better on digit span tests) and one’s mood (clinically depressed individuals perform worse). However, another major factor is one’s age. Memory span appears to increase during childhood and then plateau in the late teenage years. After the age of twenty, researchers have documented a steady decline, at least as measured by traditional digit span techniques.2 So one factor that potentially makes language learning harder for adults is the gradual diminution of one’s ability to hold several things in mind at once. This loss, while far from ideal, may not be as problematic as it first appears. Adults possess more general world knowledge than children, so they can employ chunking far more effectively. Age may adversely affect one’s digit span, but knowledge and experience make it easy to compensate for this decline by making sense out of these numbers.

  What does all this mean for language learning? Often in a language class, students are asked to listen to a dialogue or spoken text and then repeat back verbatim what they heard. This is a difficult task in the best of circumstances, and with age, the task becomes more difficult. In fact, even when people are asked to do this in their native language, they are often unable to do so. Native speakers will paraphrase what they hear—being true to the meaning of the phrase, even if they don’t use the exact same words.

  Therefore, when language learners try to memorize and then repeat long parts of a text verbatim, they are actually testing their working memory, rather than developing linguistic competence. Such oral drills and memorization exercises discriminate against the adult language learner. “The adult learns best not by rote, but by integrating new concepts and material into already existing cognitive structures.”3

  This is not to say that language students do not need to memorize anything. And it is also not to say that listening comprehension is unimportant. Of course, students will need to memorize vocabulary words and phrases. This is especially true for idiomatic expressions (for example, letting the cat out of the bag can’t really be paraphrased as releasing the feline from the sack). But rote memorization of dialogue and text is a cognitively demanding task that will most likely frustrate the adult language learner. Rather than focusing on exercises that primarily tax working memory, we suggest that adult language learners acquire new vocabulary, grammatical structures, and idiomatic expressions by focusing on meaning. Learning to chunk seemingly disconnected words into meaningful units, and focusing on meaning through the use of paraphrasing, will make the time spent studying more effective.

  As you may have guessed, the story of working memory is a bit more complicated than described so far. In fact, researchers a
re still debating the exact size of working memory.4 But is a container metaphor the best way to conceptualize working memory in the first place?

  The British psychologist Alan Baddeley and others began to suspect that working memory was more than just a temporary repository for things you’ve heard or seen. These researchers began a program of research in the 1970s that continues to the present day. Through a series of studies, they demonstrated that instead of being a monolithic structure, working memory actually consists of a number of cognitive subcomponents, the most important of which for our purposes is called the central executive.5

  As we saw earlier, one way of thinking about working memory is to conceptualize it as a purse that can hold a limited number of coins. Baddeley, in contrast, conceptualized it as a workbench—a place where mental contents can be actively manipulated. Information from long-term memory can be called up from storage and brought into working memory to help with the task at hand (much like how you used your knowledge of American history to recognize significant years in our earlier example). Moving information to and from long-term memory is one of the roles of the central executive.

  As you’ve gotten older, you may have noticed that you’re more easily distracted by competing demands on your attention. For example, you may start one task, say, unloading the dishwasher, and then get distracted by a phone call or a televised news report playing in a different room. And after you’ve finished your phone call or watching the news story, you may have forgotten all about your original goal of putting away the plates and silverware in the kitchen. This kind of thing can happen at any age, of course, but research suggests that a culprit for those in middle age may be a decline in the central executive’s ability to deal with competing information.6 Just as a business executive might become harried as a horde of underlings make demands for attention and decisions, the central executive may find itself juggling too many tasks, and this can lead to making errors or forgetting.