S. N. Bhanoo, “How immersion helps to learn a language,” New York Times, April 2, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/how-immersion-helps-to-learn-a-new-language.html.
CHAPTER 13
Grosjean said that most bilinguals are not, in fact, bicultural, writing that “there is the misconception that all bilinguals are bicultural (they are not) and that they have double personalities (as a bilingual myself, and with a sigh of relief, I can tell you that this is not the case).” F. Grosjean, “What bilingualism is NOT,” August 2010. http://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/bilingualism_is_not_en.html.
CHAPTER 14
Researcher Arturo E. Hernandez shared his experience of learning multiple languages in his book The Bilingual Brain. A. E. Hernandez, The Bilingual Brain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).
In his 1881 book Les maladies de la mémoire, the father of French psychology, Théodule-Armand Ribot, wrote of a forester living on the border of Poland who grew up speaking Polish and later in life moved to a German-speaking area. While in this town, he didn’t hear or speak Polish for more than thirty years. T.A. Ribot, Les maladies de la mémoire (Paris: Bailliere, 1881).
Patricia Kuhl studied Catalan and Spanish bilingual infants and found that they could detect subtle differences between the two languages as early as age four months, even though they are both Romance languages and have shared word sounds and vocabulary and a similar cadence (linguists call this prosody). P. K. Kuhl et al., “Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months,” Developmental Science 9 (2006): F13–F21.
A. Garcia-Sierra et al., “Bilingual language learning: an ERP study relating early brain responses to speech, language input, and later word production,” Journal of Phonetics (2011).
In a 2004 study, researcher M. Rosario Rueda tested bilingual children using a task-switching game . . . M. R. Rueda et al., “Development of attentional networks in childhood,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 1029–1040.
More specifically: if you’re like the rest of us, after your twenties you’ll slowly start losing brain mass. That loss accelerates when you get into your fifties. By the time you hit your seventies, you will have lost 5 to 6 percent of your total brain mass compared to what you had at age thirty. By age eighty, you can lose as much as 25 percent. R. Peters, “Ageing and the Brain,” Postgraduate Medical Journal 82, no. 964 (2006): 84–88.
R. Scahill et al., “A longitudinal study of brain volume changes in normal ageing using serial registered magnetic resonance imaging,” Archives of Neurology 60, no. 7 (2003): 989–994.
L. Svennerholm et al., “Changes in weight and compositions of major membrane components of human brain during the span of adult human life of Swedes,” Acta Neuropathologica 94, no. 4 (1997): 345–352.
Bialystok’s research showed that even in bilinguals with significant impairment from dementia, the rest of their brain seemed to compensate for the loss, allowing them to stave off the effects of dementia for much longer than their monolingual peers (four to five years before symptoms begin to show), even when their fMRI scans showed similar loss. Dr. Bialystok has researched the topic of aging and bilingualism extensively:
E. Bialystok et al., “Effects of bilingualism and aging on executive function and working memory,” Psychology and Aging 29 (2014): 696–705.
E. Bialystok et al., “Effects of bilingualism on the age of onset and progression of MCI and AD: Evidence from executive function tests,” Neuropsychology 28 (2014): 290–304.
E. Bialystok, “Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (2011): 229–235.
F. Craik et al., “Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve,” Neurology 75 (2010): 1726–1729.
M. Freedman et al., “Delaying onset of dementia: are two languages enough?” Behavioural Neurology 2014 (2014): 808137.
J. F. Kroll and E. Bialystok, “Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition,” Journal of Cognitive Psychology 25 (2013): 497–514.
G. Luk et al., “Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control?” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14 (2011): 588–595.
G. Luk et al., “Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults,” Journal of Neuroscience 31 (2011): 16808–16813.
L. Luo et al., “Bilingualism interacts with domain in a working memory task: evidence from aging,” Psychology and Aging 28 (2013): 28–34.
L. Ossher et al., “The effect of bilingualism on amnestic mild cognitive impairment,” Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 68 (2013): 8–12.
CHAPTER 15
As I discovered these aspects of Arabic, I became more interested in the history of Islam, and bought the book Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary, an American historian who grew up in Afghanistan and now lives in San Francisco. T. Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (New York: Public Affairs, 2010).
CHAPTER 16
Linguists Virginia Volterra and Traute Taeschner studied two Italian-German bilinguals and found that one girl had a vocabulary of eighty-seven words with just three words that matched in both languages. V. Volterra and T. Taeschner, “The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children,” Journal of Child Language 5 (1978): 311–326.
One study examined Korean children who were adopted between ages one and three years and moved to the United States to join non-Korean-speaking families. D. Birdsong, “Introduction: whys and why nots of the critical period hypothesis for second language acquisition,” in D. Birdsong (ed.), Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), pp. 1–22.
J. E. Flege, “Age of learning and second language speech,” in D. Birdsong (ed.), Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), pp. 101–131.
In François Grosjean’s book Bilingual: Life and Reality, he tells the story of two brothers who are acquiring French . . . F. Grosjean, Bilingual: Life and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 15.
If an fMRI scan were done of me speaking Mandarin or Arabic compared to speaking my native English, it would show activity in different areas, not the same areas that it would show if I were natively bilingual. G. Vingerhoets et al., “Multilingualism: an fMRI study,” NeuroImage 20 (2003): 2181–2196.
By the way, this brain development is so important that if you don’t learn any language by the time you’re about thirteen years old, it’s probably impossible for you to ever fully use any language correctly. S. Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994).
In another case, a six-and-a-half-year-old child named Isabelle was found having spent her life locked up in a darkened room with her deaf-mute mother. After they escaped, she was first tested at a mental age of nineteen months with no language skills at all. S. Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Morrow, 1994).
CHAPTER 19
A study by the American University of Beirut in 1999 showed that at one point most twenty-somethings in Beirut were suffering from PTSD. M. B. Abu-Saba, “War-related trauma and stress characteristics of American University of Beirut students,” Journal of Traumatic Stress (January 1999): 201–207.
CHAPTER 26
Janet Werker at the University of British Columbia famously studied this when she tested Japanese infants. . . . “I had traveled all the way around the world to learn languages to teach them to my son, and now, at a bold three and a half years old, he had asked me to knock it off. You know what? I did.” A similar story from the New Republic that I found after the fact: N. Scheiber, “For Three Years, I Spoke Only Hebrew to My Daughter. I Just Gave It Up. Here’s Why,”
New Republic, April 21, 2014. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117469/why-i-stopped-speaking-my-daughter-hebrew.
CHAPTER 27
In the 1970s and 1980s, Henri Tajfel wrote about this phenomenon and called it social identity theory. For more on his theories, here is his latest book on the topic: H. Tajfel, Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful and humbled to have had so much help and guidance in the creation of this book. To my agent, Joy Tutela, you made this book possible, working as a partner and mentor each step of the way. Thank you for lending me your experience and being the calm center in the storm. To my editor, Gigi Campo, you are amazing. I always felt like you understood where this book was meant to go, even from the very beginning. You have my utmost gratitude for helping to shape this book.
There were so many academics and researchers who fielded my questions, but to Daniel Everett, Vivian Cook, and Diane Deutsch, I’m especially thankful for your generosity and patience.
I’d also like to thank my friends and family who have weathered many late nights, long discussions, and uncertainty along this journey. Love and gratitude to the Gilbert family, Kayt Sukel, the Lozano family, and all my friends in Chiang Mai, Beijing, Beirut, Bucerías, and Barcelona.
Finally, Drew, you make my whole life possible. Thank you for supporting all my crazy schemes, picking me up when I fall down, and joyfully leaping with me into the next big adventure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Gilbert is a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker, and is the creator of the popular blog Almost Fearless. She and her family were named National Geographic Travelers of the Year in 2014. Gilbert’s writing and photography have been seen on Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and BBC Travel. Originally from the Boston area, Gilbert now lives in Barcelona, Spain, with her husband, Drew, and their children, Cole and Stella.
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