 Hi, my name is Tracy Tagohama-Spinosa and this is a video on myths of multilingualism. As some of you might have already seen in other videos, we have a lot of information, new things that are coming out about biliteracy, the multilingual brain, how there's a slight difference in neural correlates related to language processing between monolinguals and bilinguals, and we're going to use that as a foundation to talk about these different myths. I also want to emphasize that it's not just the evidence that we're looking at there, although that there's a lot of strong information coming from neuroscience and psychology these days, but this is also grounded to my own personal raising of three different multilingual children. So you're invited to have a look at these other videos on the learningsciences.com and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to write us. There's only one agenda item today and that is to look at the most common neural myths related to the teaching we're learning of second, third, fourth language. And we want to talk about the implications that has for raising children within homes as well as our teaching processes within classroom structures. So there's a bunch of neural myths that have been generated that I've been documenting over the past 25 years. Mainly they came from specialists, pediatricians, from people who have looked at the literature or maybe looked only at a single element of the literature, maybe only the neural scientific perspective or maybe only the education perspective. And what we want to do is take a transdisciplinary lens at looking at these questions to understand why some of these things can be categorized as myths, things that aren't true about the way brains actually learn language and what we can do about them in our own homes or classrooms to improve foreign language acquisition. So there are tons of myths and I've just pulled a couple of them that I think are the most juicy or that have been around the longest or that do the most damage. And we're going to be looking at those individually. And what I'd love for you to do is document the question marks you have around the information. Each one of the myths and the opinion about whether or not there's evidence or no evidence is documented in a bundle in a mini library related to neural myths or myths and multilingualism, which I'm very happy to share with you so you can see where our evidence is coming from. So let's start off with one of these very typical ones, you know, some languages are easier to learn than others. Many people claim, you know, oh, I'll never be able to learn Chinese. I'd rather learn something easy like Spanish or something like that. Is that true? Some languages are easier to learn than others. The truth of the matter is, is that it depends. It depends on your age, your goals and your prior languages. The earlier the better. A child brought up bilingual from birth is not going to have, you know, the Mandarin-speaking mother and the Spanish-speaking father and say, oh, I'm only going to learn Spanish, right? Children brought up bilingual from birth do not judge their languages in that way. But when we get to literacy, there is a very big amount of literature weighing in on the complexities of different types of orthographic systems and how that changes the brain. And so you can't really answer this question, yes or no, true or false. But you can look at the literature and you can ask yourself, what is your objective in asking this question? Are you doubting about whether or not you should launch into a foreign language from birth? Definitely. Bottom line is the earlier the better. But this is also to forgive people who say, well, it's just so hard to learn to write in English, which is such an irregular language as far as spelling is concerned. True. And it's good to be able to understand those points, but the big idea is that it depends. It depends on the age of the individual, the goals. And also we'll talk a little bit later about the influence of first languages. If a child is learning another language, what is the first language and how does that impact foreign language acquisition? Another idea out there is that learning languages is hard. Independent of the number of languages you know, it's just going to always be a hard thing to do. And this is actually false because we know the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn an additional one. And so it's pretty clear that going from your first to your second foreign language is tough. And going from two to three is a little bit easier. But by the time you're going from your third to your fourth language, it becomes really quite easy. And people who know more than five languages actually pick up languages rather quickly. And so very interesting. So yeah, it's a steep learning curve. But once you've got it, it actually snowballs in a positive way afterwards. Another question that comes up is whether or not most of the world is actually monolingual. This comes from a lot of our friends in the United States who think that everybody speaks English. The answer to this question though is kind of mixed, right? It really depends. It depends on if we're talking about spoken or written. So if we know that there's over 6,000 languages in the world and there's only 200 countries, we know that most everyone is speaking more than one language. Having said that, just only slightly more than half the world is literate. So that means that not very much people are reading and writing in those languages. So speaking is very different from reading and writing. And those are different kinds of objectives. So no, most of the world is not monolingual if it comes down to speaking skills. Another question that we often get from parents who are worried about upbringing of children and what they might be missing out if we're forcing another language on them, you know, it takes away time and it has an opportunity cost that kids won't be doing other things. That is just not true. It depends on how, you know, what is the methodology. If you're actually sending them to a particular class and saying, OK, you're going to English school or a Japanese school, could be, could be. But if you fold it into something that the child is already motivated to do, for example, my daughter learned French because she wanted to go to ballet class and Geneva and all the classes were in French. And she adored the teacher, adored the class, adored ballet. So she learned French through ballet class. And so you don't have to have this opportunity class of actually doing language or something else. You can actually strategize so that it can be one in the same. Another question here is that some languages are more important than others. And this gets to linguistic hegemony and the idea that I guess everybody has to speak, you know, X or the presumption that there is a dominant language. Absolutely. The high status languages have typically been the ones in which we either have commerce, academia, or military exchanges. And at the moment in time, English seems to be in that direction. Many people say, oh, yes, but Chinese is catching up. Big idea here is that Chinese is broken down into many other sub languages. Chinese is not just one, right? And I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime. But I think that maybe 45, 50 years from now it might be true. But to answer this question, there is no language that is more important than any other. It just has to do with its place in the world, the roles that it plays. And when we try to look for global communication, how is that actually facilitated? What if I were to ask you, independent of the language, thoughts and concepts and ideas can be expressed equally? This gets to be a little bit philosophical, doesn't it, right? Because schematic representation of ideas is really, really interesting. We know that there's no intelligence test in the world that does not depend heavily on vocabulary, for example. And so is your ability to express ideas in one language equal to another? And does that reflect the true nature of whatever it is we're talking about? Maybe when we're talking about objects like dog and the chien or perro, you can have a single name for objects. That could be. But what about when you're talking about things like concepts, like freedom or liberty? Are they equally expressed? And so we know that you can express the same idea or the same emotions. But you may need more vocabulary words. We know that if anybody who's ever done a Google translate on a document, it's really funny that if you stick in something in English, it comes out about one and a half times longer in Spanish, just because it's using more words to get the same concept. So that's a very interesting reflection to have. And the idea is that all languages have the words basically that are needed for that society's objectives. And to clarify this, all languages have the same amount of words, false. And in fact, the average college dictionary in English has about twice as many words as a Spanish dictionary for the same level. But the main reason is in English, we don't have something like the Academia Real de Español, which judges whether or not words should stay in and stay out. And in English, we always let words in and we never kick things out. And we use a lot of slang and there's a lot of words that have gone into a typical dictionary, which have not been officiated into French and Spanish, for example. And so very clearly, different languages have different amounts of words. Whether or not that has any implication about learning and thinking is something still open to debate. This is sort of a fun side fact here that, the greatest number of native speakers is definitely in Chinese. But again, if we break that down into Mandarin, Cantonese and other subsets, there is a difference there. And then that's followed by native speakers. There's a fight here going on between Spanish and English. And recently, Spanish has become the second most spoken language. But English is by far the most spoken second language or foreign language in the world. And there's actually more people learning English outside of the United States and the UK and Australia than there are learning inside of those countries. So that's also a little fun fact there. So here's another question. There's an optimal age that people should learn foreign languages. Now, this is a huge question because we're now looking more seriously at lifelong learning. People are living longer. And we also know that cognitive flexibility can be extended into old age, so long as you use it, not lose it, right? So learning into old age is actually beneficial. But it depends really on what your objective is in foreign languages. We basically, the rule of thumb, as we mentioned before, the earlier, the better. But what's really curious is that adults can and do learn foreign languages better and faster than children. And that depends on the objective. This is on all skill sets, like vocabulary learning, grammar and all the rest of it. The one thing that is hugely different between adults and kids is the size of your ego. Little kids are willing to experiment and use language a lot more freely than adults who don't like to make mistakes in front of their peers. So if we ask, is it impossible for an adult to learn a new language as fast as a child? In fact, it's the opposite. Adults can and do learn foreign languages better and faster than kids do, mainly because they have prior knowledge on which they can base their information, their new learning, and they learn faster because they can use the cues. They know that all languages have subject verbs and objects and they have to be in a specific order. And so grammatical rules can be generalized. And what we know about language can be applied to the new language. Lachlan did a really interesting study in which he took monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals, and they were all in this room. And he said, we'll be right back. And they left a bunch of pieces of paper on the table that was basically an ancient script, a language that nobody knew anymore. And fascinating, monolinguals are scribbling and doodling and making paper airplanes, whereas the bilinguals are curious about the language. And the multilinguals actually figured out the grammar. They looked and they said, ah, that must be a pronoun and these must be verbs because they look the same but they change at the end. So they figured out the language just by what they knew about prior knowledge of languages. And so we know that we can use this as a crutch adults who already know languages can actually learn languages faster than children. The main thing they have to do is get over the fear of speaking in public. So they get over their big egos and they'd be able to do it a little bit quicker. But then this is attached to another question. You say, ah, but adults, my kids don't have any accent and I've been here in Austria for months and I just can't pick up the right accent. What's really interesting, now here's the question. It's impossible for an adult to learn a new language without an accent. Nothing is impossible. So that should always be a red flag when you see that. But what's so interesting is, yeah, an adult can learn a foreign language without an accent. There's about five different reasons we have accents. But the point is, is it worth the effort? So remember we said that adults are faster because they have prior experience with other languages. So all new learning passes through a filter of prior experience. We're always comparing the new things with what we already know. So whatever new language you're learning, you're learning it through this filter of your old language. Now we have accents for a whole lot of reasons. So depending on the number of phonemes, a number of sounds in your first language or languages, you will naturally have or not have an accent in the next language. So if you've learned, for example, Danish or Swedish as your first language, the likelihood of speaking other languages without an accent is really high because there's a whole lot of phonemes in that language. But if you come from a language like Japanese which has very few phonemes, it's gonna be really highly likely that you are gonna have an accent in your languages. And so that's one big reason that people have accents. Another reason that people have accents is that you cannot pronounce what you cannot perceive. And so we know that around three and a half to four and a half years of age as your head grows really fast, right? There's these bones that are called ossicles. They descend into the neural pathway and they actually change the way sounds are perceived. And so basically learning a language from birth means you're not gonna have an accent. So that's a really great benefit of learning a language early in life is that you won't have an accent. But if you're learning it after that window, three and a half, four and a half years old, the likelihood is that you won't be able to hear it as clearly so it's hard to perceive it to be able to pronounce it without an accent. Now having said that, your brain has to create a new neural pathway for a sound that it has a hard time perceiving. Can you do that? You absolutely can. There's a lot of research on a fellow called Tomates in France who guarantees he can teach anybody to speak any language without an accent. And what does he basically do is he just ramrods it into your head. He puts on headphones and he goes to the Japanese speakers who don't have a distinction between ra and la or who and foo. He says ra, la, ra, la, ra, la. Now you ra, la, ra, la, no, again, again, again. And so basically he's forcing you to have a muscle reaction to sound perception in a different way to forge a connection that you didn't have before. So this costs thousands of dollars and if you're willing to pay for it you can definitely get rid of your accent if it's necessary. Now that's what's so interesting is why are we speaking the other language and is it because we wanna have a perfect accent? If it is, then you definitely can go that direction. Other times it has to do with just basically communication. So maybe not having a perfect accent is not necessarily important. And some people actually love their accents. Why? Because it's a real cultural marker. It allows other people to know where you're from without having to state it outright, you know, that oh yes, the reason I have this accent or whatever it is, my husband speaks five languages all fluently but with a very Latin accent because he wants everybody to know, you know, I'm speaking Japanese but I'm Ecuadorian and I'm speaking English but I'm Ecuadorian. It's a cultural marker and that's really important to a lot of people. So keeping your accent has other psychological purposes as well. Another question, only really young children can learn foreign languages. Absolutely untrue. I'll give you an anecdotal evidence. When I got married to a Spanish speaking person, my grandmother at age 79 who's a little Japanese woman this big, who knew Japanese and who English, decided she was gonna learn some Spanish and she did a great job at doing that. We know that people can learn throughout the lifespan. There is neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan but there is an inverse curve in energy. So as we said before, the new things that you learn pass to the filter of prior experience, right, and so the older you are, the more prior experience you have. So there's a lot more cognitive load, a lot more energy that goes into filtering out what you know and don't know to be able to learn the new language. But again, that can be beneficial, right? What you already know about languages can speed up your process of learning languages. So can older people eventually become fluent? Yeah, absolutely they can. So there's no evidence that old people cannot become fluent. But we have to look back at, you know, what is the objective? And different people have different objectives for learning language. I know adults who are told, if you can learn Cantonese in one year, I will double your salary, they learn the language. So they have this high intrinsic motivation and so they learn quickly. Other people who are moved to other places or countries, maybe spouses of these people who didn't have that natural intrinsic interest in learning language, may not learn as fast. So you have to look at why the individual may or may not learn languages as fast amongst the crowd of adults. It's not that globally older people can or cannot learn languages, it's why people are motivated to do so. A nine year old has the same size brain as an adult. That's actually true. Therefore they learn foreign languages in the same way. That's actually false, right? We know that there's a huge social element to learning languages. The little seven year old who's playing in the backyard who is dying to play with the football of his neighbor is gonna learn the language of that kid so that they can play together. He has a different kind of motivation. And the 14 year old girl who just was moved to a new country who hates language, hates your parents, hates the school, hates everything, she's gonna find a crowd that also hates everything that she does and she's not gonna learn the language at all, right? And the adult, the mother who was also brought along on this foreign trip or whatever, she can survive in English or in whatever her native language is and live with the TV news that she gets in cable and she doesn't have to do this. So again, motivation and social context play a huge role in whether or not an individual can learn foreign languages quickly or not. A bilingual child will always have identity problems and feel a lack of belonging to his cultures because he'll never feel a part of either. I have to say that that's a really almost laughable presumption before it was that, you know, there's split personalities of people with multiple languages. There are testimonials of individuals who say, yeah, they just feel freer or easier to express in one language or another, and that's true. But feeling that you have no self-identity because of languages is a falsehood. I've just watched this with my own three children and all of their friends who grew up a multilingual, you grow with an identity that is that multilingual identity. And so I would say that, yes, this might be true in some very rare cases, but for the most part, this is not, lack of identity is not necessarily a part of foreign language acquisition. Bilinguals tend to translate from weaker language to stronger. There's a lot of interesting evidence for this in the early stages of bilingualism. Remember we said only learning passes through the filter of prior experience? So people are looking at what they already know, so they use, it's very smart actually, to use what you already know about a word or a concept and translate that. But that's the lower levels or initial stages of learning a foreign language. After that, it picks up and there's no need to actually go into this translating step in your head you actually just use language. True bilinguals never mix their languages? Actually, that's a really fascinating question because we always thought that that was a sign of poor language ability when you mixed. Now we know through some really interesting studies in trans-languaging that that is part and parcel of a really proficient language learners ability is knowing when and how to choose and pick and choose amongst their language to speak. So trans-languaging is this idea that if you and I have equal abilities and two different languages or more and we freely choose amongst our vocabularies to get precision for the right conceptual understanding, that's trans-languaging and that's totally acceptable and it's actually super smart, right? We think that this myth is born of the idea that in earlier studies back in the 70s and 80s we thought that the kids who would mix and match it's because they basically didn't have enough vocabulary and that meant that they had very poor language so they would do code switching and mix because of that. So code switching's not on the positive but actually trans-languaging is actually very positive. Bilinguals have split personalities. No, this kind of goes with that other concept there that oh, you're a different person when you speak Spanish or when you speak Japanese. Very interesting idea. Some very early studies suggested that back in the early 70s. We do not go in that direction anymore in the 2020s. The ability to learn a foreign language is directly related to the level of intelligence of an individual. That is a really interesting idea, especially given immigration status. We used to think that oh, he can't even speak English, therefore he's not so smart. Totally untrue. And to take this point further, we know that people with, for example, people with Down syndrome can learn foreign languages exceptionally even though on an IQ scale they might not look that intelligent and so we know that there's no parallel there. Having said that, when I put this question to if Howard Gardner's linguistic intelligence as part of a measure of intelligence would include foreign languages, well I presume so. The idea here is that learning another language is a way to express intelligence and we know the more words you know and language you know that there tends to be a direct correlation to intelligence tests. And so there's something to this but it does not hold when it comes down to saying that people have to be intelligent to learn languages or is it the opposite? Languages actually make you more intelligent. All people who are bilingual from birth make excellent translators. Not true. Translation is a fantastic ability and it is really interesting because now we mainly call these people interpreters, not necessarily translators because translation would be a direct translation which you can get a machine to do but we know that much of language has to do with the interpretation. We give context and nuances of languages and so interpreters really have to make a lot of judgment calls about the way that they use language and that is something that is a learned skill. It is not something that comes naturally and you're not naturally born to be an interpreter if you know multiple languages. Bilinguals are more creative than monolinguals. This is a really interesting one because there's almost no studies out there. There's basically two really good ones. Riccaldelli in 1992 noted that on 33 measures of creativity because you can measure creativity in a lot of ways, is it through a sculpture or painting or problem solving, right? That bilinguals and monolinguals actually scored superior on 30 out of 33 of those tests. So there's this jump to conclusion then that people who are bilingual are superior in creative contexts to monolinguals which got questioned a lot but it was really, really interesting. If you look at Caracuna's new study on this, it pretty much emphasizes very similar things that Riccaldelli says is you can't define, everything depends on your definition of creativity but it does seem that additional languages change your mental schemata. If you know that this can be a table and it can be a mess, if it can have multiple names to it then you can also think that, well, maybe there's something to multiple perspective taking. So basically approaching problems from different ways and so we know that there's a direct correlation to executive functions and cognitive flexibility related to bilingualism. So it could stem from that but no conclusive evidence yet. By learning more than one language, a child can suffer brain overload. This is a very California concept here. It's as if, and this is what we thought back in the 70s is that, okay, you have pieces of your brain that are dedicated to language and math and whatever. Totally false now. With new technology, we now see that just about everything is a set of complex neural networks that cross hemispheres and that they're constantly looking at multiple subsets of what languages or math is or whatever and these create different connections. When you look at the brain of an early bilingual, somebody who's bilingual from birth, their brains look almost identical to monolinguals which is fascinating, right? But kids who learn languages slightly later, let's say past that three year old age and forward, they actually have slightly larger Broca's area in the posterior area. So it grows a little bit to compensate. It's kind of like a kid who have damage to one kidney so the other kidney grows larger. Well, in this case, Broca's area because it's handling more than one language grows slightly larger, not really clear about why, right? And so the processing of languages really depends on the combination and structure of language. But we also know that it's impossible to have brain overload because you can actually see that a bilingual is actually using, a late bilingual is actually using more of their brain or these different connections than a monolingual. And so basically there's no such thing as that you can be overwhelmed. Now can a child feel, psychologically, feel overwhelmed? They've just been dropped into a new bilingual school, there's a new language, they're just overwhelmed with life and all the rest of that. Yeah, definitely. Anxiety and stress from the pressure to learn a language can make you feel overwhelmed but it's not because your brain can't handle it. Psychologically, you might be stressed out but your brain can handle having more than one language. Bilingual students achieve higher results on English language proficiency tests than their anglophone monolingual peers. This is totally true, which is fascinating because you'd think, well, if you spoke the language from birth, you should be able to do great on those language tests. Well, the truth of the matter is late bilinguals who learn language, understanding better grammar and all the rest of that because they're explicitly taught those points of grammar actually do better on English language tests than native speakers who don't even know or understand or question the grammar of their own language, okay? So there are benefits of multilingualism, multiple benefits. We have a whole bundle on the benefits of multilingualism and bilingualism if you'd like to see this, but there's multiple levels. There are profound effects on ability to listen, speak, writing as well as in vocabulary and in grammar increases. So bilinguals have worse executive functions monolingual and opposite bilinguals have far better executive functions. Multilinguals are shown to be faster at working memory than monolinguals absolutely. Working memory capacity as well as cognitive flexibility as well as inhibitory control. These are the three elements of executive functions are all superior in multilinguals and bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. And you can probably imagine why it would be true. You know, you have to working memory basically you're having to hold information in working memory until it's used for another purpose and bilinguals are doing that all the time. They're constantly having information, maintaining it in mind while they actually process it to use it for another purpose. So it makes sense that working memory is extended as well as other executive functions. Bilinguals have less cognitive flexibility than monolinguals as this third element of executive functions. So working memory control, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, all of those are enhanced in bilinguals. Bilinguals have lower inhibitory control. This is the third element, right? Bilinguals actually have superior inhibitory control to monolingual children. So they are able to block out inhibitory control means you're able to choose what you're gonna pay attention to and choose what your focus is, keep your eye on the prize there and achieve. And so multiple studies now showing that bilinguals are superior in that effect. Just a parenthetical reference, when people debate whether or not bilingualism improves executive functions, the main problem with the studies is the definition of executive functions. So I'm using the definition of Adele Diamond in Canada that shows that executive functions have three basic skills, working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility. Those will then permit you to do other things like planning and other higher order functions. So if you break down executive functions in that way, bilinguals are always superior. Bilingualism reduces emotional intelligence. Actually the opposite, right? Bilingualism enhances emotional intelligence. One of the things that's really interesting in the field of cultural neuroscience is to understand that facial interpretation is really unique to the individual. Most of us, the face we know best is our own. We see it in the mirror all the time, right? So we can quickly judge emotional reactions on faces that look like our own. And we're really lousy at judging facial expressions and intentions on faces that look different or that are other races or genders than ourselves. And so that's a really important thing to keep in mind. But apparently bilinguals and multilinguals are a little bit better at that subtle nuance understanding of what people's facial expressions actually mean and the emotions that are linked to them. So this is a bit of a longer statement. Let's break it down. The quality of the first language impacts the quality of the second language. That's actually true. And the quality of the third language depends on the quality of the second language. That's actually false. Both second, third and subsequent language depend on the quality of the first. So the first language, I'm having a good solid foundation in your first language makes a huge difference in your success with subsequent languages. So a logical statement following that would be to say then a child should learn to study in his native language first and then after he's mastered it, then he should learn a whole new one. That's not true. Even though it might sound logical based on that previous statement that you have to have a strong foundation in your first language, it does not preclude learning a second language simultaneously or even a third language simultaneously with the first as long as the first is given priority in terms of shoring up good grammatical modeling, a strong vocabulary, age appropriate, language use. All of those things make a difference in subsequent languages. And so we know multiple school systems in which a child does learn their first language and then tries to learn their second language, especially when it has to do with literacy. So once they're literate, then they can learn a second language. Not my favorite model. There are other models that are the opposite where the child actually learns to read and write in the second language or third language before they learn to do that in their first language. Not a fan of that either. But there's also models in which you see this parallel construction of biliteracy skills. So long as they're separated by person, place and time. This strategy is highly important when you're trying to get strong biliteracy skills. So long as you can divide those experiences by person, place and time, there's never been a problem. So if you ask them, you know, a child who learns two languages simultaneously will be confused and they'll have lower intelligence. We used to think that, you know, used to think that because children would, you know, struggle as they were trying to think. And we know that the average bilingual kid would learn to speak or speak fluently several months behind their monolingual peers. And so this was our first suspicion is that, oh, if they're actually, you know, overloading their brains and not, not, and they're being confused. But that's not true. It's short lived, but it's very important stage of actually trying to figure out what are those lines of communication? How can I simultaneously understand the mental schema for a dog in multiple languages if it's coming in from different inputs? And so those strengthening of those neural connections last over time and are well worth a small amount of few months behind that a bilingual appears to look like they have lower language skills. By the time that kid is eight, you don't know the difference. If they've been brought up bilingual from birth or if they've brought up monolingual from birth or if they've had four languages from birth, around eight years of age, you'll see a leveling out and they will appear very much the same in terms of their oral fluency and their emergent literacy skills. So when a child learns his native languages from birth, he's effectively learning them as two first languages. Yes, and that's kind of crazy because you say, oh, what's your first language? Well, if you were brought up bilingual from birth, the whole point here has to do with quantity and quality of input. Just having one parent being one language and another being another language does not mean that you have equal quantity or quality of input. So if dad is only talking to the kid in his native language on the weekends, during the same kind of activity, that's gonna be very limited vocabulary and that kid is not gonna thrive in that particular language, right? So you have to have quality and quantity input on both levels, okay? So if you're thinking about two languages in one brain, you're gonna have multiple theories that are going on now, but now we can actually look at neural networks that are stimulated and there's still a huge variety because it depends on the age of acquisition, it depends on the types of languages. Do they share the same alphabets, for example? There's a lot of differences. So looking at a monolingual or bilingual brain will vary depending on the combination of languages, when the person learned them, all kinds of things as far as the quantity, quality, input, all of those things will shape the neural networks for looking at those languages, right? And we've had these studies pretty much, for the past 20 years, we've already been able to see the differences between looking at monolinguals, bilinguals, and how they differ in their neural structure. But now we have something called the Connecton Project, which is showing us far greater detail than these earlier studies could have. So another question comes up is that, language learning is independent of the home, school, influences, and culture. People learn languages, they just learn languages. This couldn't be more false, you know? All learning is social. And so understanding your social context, how you feel in that context, how you feel about the school, the teacher, your environment has a huge influence on whether or not you become successful with your languages. There's no such thing as an aptitude for foreign languages, not quite true. Aptitude is normally related to something that's innate. So maybe you were born with this, which means it has to be genetic. And so the question is, are you who you are because of your nature or your nurture? And we now know both are true. And it's typically now considered nature via nurture. You're born with a certain aptitude, but you have to make the most of it based on your environment. So we know that only a fraction of your genes are actually potentiated by the environment you live in. And so having those experiences makes a lot of difference there. We also have studies by people like Moffitt in 2011 that showed that, you know, attitude is actually a lot more telling than aptitude. Getting a kid to self-regulate to decide I'm gonna stay focused on something accounts for almost double innate intelligence in terms of academic outcomes. So do take that into consideration. There is such a thing as an aptitude, but kids with high aptitude are not the only ones who do learn foreign languages. All foreign languages are equally hard to learn. Classic response here, it depends. It depends on your native language. It depends on whether you're just speaking or reading and writing. There's a lot of things that it depends on, but foreign language are not necessarily all equally hard. For example, if you already knew Italian and you're going to learn Spanish, they're incredibly mutually intelligible languages. Somebody who knows Spanish who listens to Italian can understand a lot because they share the same verb roots in Latin, right? So there's a lot of, depends on the languages that you're learning. There's some language programs that can actually teach foreign languages in a matter of weeks or even days. And this means that there's no reason except for lack of motivation that many people take years to learn another language. Well, number one, nothing replaces another human being for learning languages. So these really interesting programs and there's some great apps that are out there that actually help you rehearse language and then they can teach you certain things. But where's the motivational plug? There's a lot of really interesting educational gaming and these cognitive algorithms that are baked into some of these programs that are very, very beneficial and very, very helpful. But they don't do it within weeks or days. So it's not like you, you know, stick the recording playing while you're falling asleep and you wake up in the morning speaking Arabic. None of those things is true. It does still take time and effort and a lot of time rehearsing. The main draw of these types of digital applications is that there's a hook there that continues to make you motivated that makes you spend more time rehearsing. And that leads to better fluency, perhaps faster. Resistance to foreign languages is purely psychological. Whenever you get like always, never purely only red flags, you know, it's never ever only one kind of a thing, right? But we do know that there are multiple things that do have psychological influences on our ability to learn foreign languages or to learn just about anything in life. Life events, trauma, abuse, psychological factors definitely play a role. However, there are also physiological impediments to learning foreign languages. So it's not only psychologically based. Skill order. So listening, speaking, reading, writing is unimportant for successful language learning. These skills can be learned in any order equally successfully. Well, this would explain why we teach adults a foreign language and we teach all those four skills at simultaneously. Bad idea, bad idea. There's a lot of research looking at the natural way humans learn languages and basically first comprehending the information, then being able to use it, speak it, right? Then being able to read and then being able to write. So there is this kind of hierarchical structure and there are multiple language programs that are built around that, the natural approach to languages that definitely have some good evidence behind it. But we also know that the older American experience you are with your own languages, your first languages that you might, first language that you might have, the less important this is. So being a good reader and writer in one language is actually a good indicator of being able to pick up straight away and learn to read and write in a foreign language as you're learning to speak and have listening comprehension. Understanding and speaking are equally as difficult as reading and writing. Really interesting segregation here. I'd like to call your attention to. One has to do with what things are receptive language and what are expressive language skills. So reception is a lot easier than actually producing language or expressive language skills. So when you understand somebody else, you know, talking very different from actually then having to use that and speak. And it's also reading, you know, passively and taking versus writing is very different. So I'm gonna add another layer to this difficulty. It is really natural to learn to speak. It is really natural to learn to communicate using spoken words. It is really unnatural and something probably that the brain was not meant to do to learn to read and write. Perhaps Dennis Lassejane and Mary Ann Wolfe, Laura and Petito, these are some wonderful researchers looking at the bilingual brain. All of them have come up independently with their own theories about how the brain learned to read when it's only a recent phenomena and humanness, right? To be able to read. The Hanna's idea is that there is a neuronal recycling hypothesis that parts of the brain that were once used for, you know, scanning the savanna to look out for that, you know, line that might come and get you is no longer necessary. So we can now use that for other things which are important in modern society like reading. And so this might also hint at why there are so many difficulties in understanding, letter to phoneme recognition or understanding how symbols represent things, not necessarily a natural skillset in the brain. So would this lead us to say that people should not learn literacy skills in two languages simultaneously? I mean, if it's such a complex process, should you learn to read and write in two languages at the same time? Again, this goes back to our strategy idea. If you have a good strategy, if you have a good strategy and you can separate by person, place and time, you can do this simultaneously. The key idea is that to learn literacy skills, a person has to first understand why do we write? And you can see this in like even little three and four year olds, they'll walk up to you and they'll say, okay, what do you wanna order? And they pretend to write something down. They know that writing has a function which is to extend our fragile memories, right? And so they understand there's a purpose for writing. They also understand, you know, left to right in English, for example, and or right to left in Japanese top to bottom, they understand the format of written words. Then they learn a phonemic alphabet. They associate one symbol with one sound. And after they do that, they have to then look at exceptions. So, oh yes, this is usually like egg, but it's also like in me or in elbow, right? So once they understand that that letter has different kinds of sounds, exceptional sounds, then you help them see how that same symbol may be pronounced differently in other languages, right? In French it can be eugh, that same letter can carry a different sound, right? So the exceptions between languages, okay? And then finally, practice repetition, familiarity and the frequency with which you are exposed to written language improves the probability of being able to read and write in another language. But we have to be patient. We have to understand that, you know, spoken oral language skills take about one to two years to achieve depending on the methodology if it's full immersion, it can be around a year and a child will speak at age appropriate level. But to learn to read and write takes around five to seven years to achieve. And so we have to have realistic expectations. If you want your kid reading and writing like a native, they have to have at least five to seven years exposed in that context. Nonverbal communication is less important in foreign language learning than in first language communication. Not true. We know that there are neural pathways related to, for example, gesture. Also this interpretation of facial expressions we talked about. There's a lot of things that we do in communication in first as well as second languages that are highly important in enhancing communication. Bilingualism can cause problems such as stuttering and dyslexia. No, no. The vast majority of the roots of stuttering are definitely psychological. So, and there are, but there is absolutely neurological basis for studying but there is far more cases, I would say nine to one, that stuttering is a psychological roots, right? Dyslexia. No, dyslexia occurs around the fifth month of gestation when different, based on your genetic makeup, different neurons go migrating to different parts of the brain and some of them clog and become ectopic cells and just clog the natural communication between certain neural networks for language. So, no, you're born with dyslexia and stuttering is definitely psychological. Can bilingualism exacerbate the problem? Absolutely. But it is not necessarily the root cause of stuttering or dyslexia. True bilinguals never confuse their languages. If they do, they're actually semi-linguels, right? So, you've heard of monolinguels and you've heard of bilinguals and you've heard of multilinguals, right? There's such a thing as a semi-lingual but semi-linguels are used to describe basically people who've been exposed to multiple languages but never have a full command of any of them. That is super, super, super rare. It was Skutka Kanges documented this in migrant children who basically traveled to multiple countries in Europe to do farming but they never had full schooling in any language and their own language at home didn't have a basis for literacy so the kids never learned to read and write in any of their languages and they only learned to speak bits and pieces of other languages. So, semi-lingualism is super rare, not a real common thing. Can it exist? Yes, it can. To get back to this question, true bilinguals never confuse their languages? Not true, not true. It depends on how much we have rehearsed and practiced those neural pathways to be able to retrieve the right language at the right time and the right moment and the right context. So, rehearsal has a lot to do with this appearance of confusion but it's not that they become semi-linguels. Monolinguals and bilingual brains are the same, not true as we've mentioned over and over again. There's a lot of new studies that show that there's increased real estate in bilingual brains and so more use, okay? So, those are some of the myths of multilingualism. I'd love to invite you to look at 10 key factors that influence basic bilingual and multilingual success within school contexts and at home have to do with timing, at what age does a person learn a language and how do they take advantage of these windows of opportunity for use, aptitude for learning, motivation, strategy, consistency, how much opportunity they have for use, the historic and linguistic relationships between languages. Do they share grammar, for example, as we talked about with Italian and Spanish? The role of other people in your life to increase opportunity, for example, siblings, does gender have any influence on language? And hand use is a reflection of cerebral dominance for language, whereas Broca and Renekis area in your brain. The growing research there, I'd love to invite you to look at the video that's on those different 10 key factors as well to continue to explore this question of myths of multilingualism. Thank you very much. If you really like to take advantage of this experience, I challenge you to just write down right now, are there three things that you learned that you didn't know before? And are there two things that you wanna know more about? And those two things you should really share with us and we were happy to point you to more literature on the information there. And perhaps one thing that you would change in your personal family life or in your professional life as a teacher of foreign languages based on the information we shared. Thank you very much. Let us know if there's anything we can do to support you in this really honorable venture of trying to encourage more people to speak more languages throughout the lifespan.