Page 11 - ELG1706 Jun Issue 448

NEWS
LANGUAGES
WOODLEYWONDERWORKS INFLUENCE

PERCEPTION OF TIME

How you perceive time depends quantity, for example a ‘small’
on the language you speak, a new break. Participants were presented
study suggests. with a screen showing a container
The research adds to growing slowly filling up and a graphic of
evidence that shows ‘the ease with lines growing to signal the passing
which language can creep into our of time.
most basic senses, including our When participants were asked
emotion and our visual perception’, in Spanish to estimate how much
researchers said. time had gone by, they referred to
In an experiment on Swedish- the container filling up. But when
Spanish bilinguals, linguists asked in Swedish, their perception
Professor Panos Athanasopoulos of time duration was more
and Professor Emanuel Bylund influenced by the lines growing.
observed that participants The results suggest that languages
understood time duration influence an individual’s concept of
differently according to the time. ‘By learning a new language,
language they used. you suddenly become attuned to
Swedish marks duration by perceptual dimensions that you
referring to distance, as in a ‘short’ weren’t aware of before,’ Professor
break, whereas Spanish prefers Athanasopoulos explained.

BILINGUALS TAKE ‘HYBRID’ APPROACH TO READING

By Claudia Civinini functional variations in the said Dr Lallier, ‘however, one of
underlying brain circuits. the most common occurrences is a
The way your brain works when Bilinguals who speak both kinds phonological deficit, the difficulty
you read varies depending on the of languages develop a ‘hybrid’ identifying correspondences
languages you speak, a review of way of reading, the researchers between sounds and letters. By
research suggests – and bilinguals say, employing a more analytical speaking one transparent language
adopt a ‘hybrid’ approach to approach in their opaque language in addition to an opaque language,
reading in both tongues. and a more global strategy in their you can compensate for this deficit
Being bilingual could even transparent language. to some extent.’
help you learn to read if you have ‘Bilingualism affects cognitive Some studies on monolinguals
dyslexia, the research adds. processes underlying literacy showed learning to read in an
The researchers explain that acquisition,’ said Dr Marie Lallier opaque language such as English
learning to read in some languages from the Basque Centre of takes more time and effort than
– where the sounds correspond Cognition, Brain and Language, in a transparent one. The authors
directly to individual letters on one of the authors of the review. argue that ‘it exacerbates potential
the page – makes the brain decode ‘The way bilinguals read is reading difficulties’, such as
written texts in very small chunks different’. making developmental dyslexia
(such as single letters). These ‘We could almost say that the more visible.
‘transparent’ languages include global and analytical reading Learning to read a transparent
Italian and Spanish, for example. strategies complement one language, instead, would promote
But in languages such as English another’, she added. the development of phonemic
– known as ‘opaque’ languages – This could give bilinguals an processing, for example the ability
the same sounds can be spelled advantage over monolinguals. to perform spelling tasks.
in many different ways. The brain One as yet unpublished research
works differently to decode the study said people with dyslexia n Lallier, M. & Carreiras, M. (2017)
words, taking larger chunks at a speaking a transparent language Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals
time. could have an advantage when reading in two alphabetic orthographies:
These different reading reading in an opaque language. the grain size accommodation hypothesis.
strategies have been linked to ‘Dyslexia is a complex disorder’, Psychonomic Bullettin & Review

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