In his dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell imagined an artificial language, Newspeak, whose restricted grammar and vocabulary were designed to limit the freedom of thought. Although that was clearly an extreme scenario, might those who speak a second language find their thoughts and behavior shaped in some lesser and more benign manner by the words they choose? In his lucid and fascinating book “The Bilingual Brain,” Albert Costa forensically explores how different languages coexist within a single human brain, locked into a functional and perpetual—although sometimes awkward and uncomfortable—embrace.
This slim work by Costa, a Barcelona-based expert on the neural basis of language processing who died in 2018, first introduces readers to an apparently indolent and babbling toddler, who it turns out is, even within the first months of its existence, a sophisticated computational machine, hard at work calculating the transitional probabilities between the sounds that will form the archives and lexical structure of its future mental dictionary. Through ingenious means, such as an electronic pacifier able to record sucking behavior and (by proxy) attention levels, Costa transports us into the mind of newborn babies to observe at close hand how they discriminate between languages only hours after their birth. Differences in sucking frequencies show that newly minted human beings are able, for example, to effortlessly differentiate Turkish speech from Japanese. By four months, even closely related languages like Spanish and Catalan are successfully discriminated.
Read Full Article »
