SECOND LANGUAGE NEWS

[Alice Faber]

At 9:40 AM -0500 3/25/2000, Thomas Paikeday wrote:
>Does anyone have more information on this [new?] discovery reported at "an
>international conference on the frontal lobes" held in Toronto last week,
>sponsored by the Rotman Research Institute of Toronto:
>
>"And so from the perch of technology [MRI brain scans], scientists have
>been able
>to pinpoint the physical location of human traits and functions. Counting.
>Spelling. Laughing. They know where a joke is processed (the right frontal
>lobe).
>They know where the brain tucks its recognition of facial expressions (the
>amygdala). THEY CAN HAVE A SUBJECT SPEAK A SECOND LANGUAGE AND TELL WHETHER HE
>LEARNED IT AS A CHILD OR AN ADULT BY WHICH BRAIN AREA LIGHTS UP [capitals
>mine]."
>
>Reported by Carolyn Abraham, Medical Reporter, in the Toronto Globe &
>Mail, Mar.
>25, 2000, p. A15.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification of the imaging research. There
was one, fairly controversial, study published a year or two ago by a team
at one of the New York hospitals looking at differences in brain activation
patterns for bilinguals speaking their L1 or L2, as a function of whether
they were early childhood bilinguals or had learned L2 later in life. As I
recall, there was no control for what L1 and L2 were (not surprising, given
the potential difficulties of recruiting folks to be subjects in such an
experiment), no control over the relative difficulties of the language
processing tasks (taking into account structural differences among the
languages). My colleagues who actually do fMRI research also, as I recall,
had some more technical questions about their methodology. The paper *may*
have been published in _Science_, but, again, I'm not remembering real well.

I could probably be more vague and citeless if I tried hard.

Alice Faber