So there I was trying to tell my dad about Stephen Krashner’s theory of language acquisition, without sounding too technical, or too complicated, or too confident (comes off as arrogent, I’m told), when I suddenly found myself saying: you need to develop your Spanish brain. (My dad wants to learn Spanish, of course).
Spanish brain. Spanish brain. My mind was thinking it through. It makes a lot of sense. Stephen Krashner never mentioned the term, but then, he’s didn’t write “The brain that changes itself” either. I would be very interested to hear a review of Stephen Krashner’s language acquisition theory from a neurology specialist! For now, I would like to speculate on it myself.
Brains are certainly mysterious things. But we (meaning those scientists) have slowly been figuring it out. They have theories about how the brain acquires new memories. About why we often have trouble associating names (aural) and faces (visual). About how we see, and how we’re able to react so blindly fast with such an apparently slow (clock-speed-wise) brain. We know about split personalities, and just the general way the brain stores information - it’s not at all like a computer’s data bank, but rather far more haphazard.
So why is that relevant here? Because to me, these things point to the idea that the language we acquire is stored in amongst the very things it represents. When we think “tree”, we instinctively bring up an image of a tree. Well it’s kind of a tree. If you think about it, it’s probably not a specific tree. It’s probably not even specific at all. It’s just linked to this concept of “tree” we have buried in our brain.
Some have talked about the problem with modern language teaching as follows:
(and I will be making the assumption that English is our native language for the sake of convenience)
Associating new words with our established English words is a terrible way to acquire a new language. The resulting recall-pathways are likely to be convoluted and our new language likely will be contaminated by English grammar mechanisms.
The problem here being that we are trying to overlay the new language, on top of the existing language. The new language then only lives a kind of half-life, having to have so much translation occur through the filter of our first language. This juxtaposition of the new language on top of the old, means the new language will always struggle to break free of the first language. From a brain perspective, there is simply little chance of the new language forming it’s own language-tree in the brain.
What’s a “language tree in the brain”? By this, I mean the build up of neurons and connections in the brain that enable us to comprend the new language. In the case of English, we have already built up our tree, with it’s connections to all the things we know, and all the (built-in) rules we have acquired. In other words, the grammar of the language is part of that tree. It is part of our knowledge and use of english. And because of the brain’s storage system, it’s not stored in one place...it’s stored all over the place. Bits here and there. Hey it works. That’s not a problem. The point is we cant simply come climbing in over that English-tree and add a new language. Not unless that language has EXACTLY the same grammar and usage mechanisms (not bloody likely).
Ergo. You can’t build up a new language on top of your first language. You have to build up a new language tree in your brain, with it’s own DIRECT connections to the things you know. And in building up that language tree, separately to your English language tree, it will automatically incorporate the structure - the GRAMMAR - of that language as it builds! Just like it did when we first learnt English!
This is where I think what I mentioned earlier about Scientists understanding the nature of Split-personalities comes into play. A split personality can occur where an event (usually traumatic) occurs and results in new branch in the mind/memory. One that the person doesn’t want. And as such, they start to develop a duality in their brain - with new events either being attached to the “bad” branch, if they are in that mood/state, or the “good” (un-infected-by the bad event) branch. Over time, these two branches/states grow. But can lose inter-connectivity simply because occurring events are predominantly stored in one branch or the other, depending on the state-of-mind at the time. Eventually, the states lose so much inter-connectivity, that they can become entirely separate personalities. Think of it like this: a brain’s neuro-connectively has an incredible maze-like complexity...but a split-personality is like two separate mazes mashed together into the same storage space. But following the threads (connections) of one, wont lead to the other, and vice-versa.
Now think of the language tree for English in your head. We don’t want to try to bolt-on a new language on that tree. We want to build a new tree. Am I saying that learning a new language (correctly) results in a new language tree forming in our brain. Yes! Will that result in a split personality? Well, not really. It’s not quite the same thing. But in a sense, yes, we could possibly develop a differing personality when we speak one language instead of another, based on the way that language tree has developed - eg. What events, good, bad etc we encountered as we were building that language tree. But more likely I expect there would be a fair amount of cross-connectivity between your English “brain” and your other-language “brain”. Even if it did occur so what (differing personality depending on what language you spoke), a split personality is an extreme example and requires very (rare) specific conditions. The idea here is simply to understand the concept and how it applies to language learning.
To be honest, I would love to hear from bilingual or multilingual speakers about their experiences and whether they feel they have much in the way of differing personalities depending on which language they are speaking.
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