"More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"

[Patrick, Peter L]

i haven't seen more than the news items, which are obviously badly reported
by Reuters, the BBC and the Guardian (eg English speakers use "half their minds")--
those supposedly intellectually-superior organs of the British press...
(not that i can see much evidence for that, as a regular reader!)

Eg, the inference that Mandarin is "harder to learn" than English appears to derive 
from an off-the-cuff remark the researcher made about adult SLA of Chinese by
English speakers -- not from any research reported. And the "long-held theories"
that this "overturns" are not described or identified.

While it's nice when research confirm things one suspects, there doesn't
appear to be anything else new here -- certainly not the speculation that lexical
tone involves music-like properties -- you have to wonder what it is that
made the researchers (psychologists, apparently) "very surprised"!

Rudi's point is well-taken. The BBC online illustrated this with a picture of a
repressive-looking Chinese soldier making a "Stop!" gesture in Tiananmen Square.
What picture would have been used if it WERE about Yoruba speakers? Or, god forbid,
about Deaf native signers? (though that research would be interesting to hear about...)

	-p-
Peter L Patrick
Dept of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
patrickp at essex.ac.uk


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gaudio, Rudolf [mailto:Rudolf.Gaudio at purchase.edu]
> Sent: 30 June 2003 22:33
> To: 'linganth at cc.rochester.edu '
> Subject: "More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English" 
> 
> 
> More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English 
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030630/hl_
> nm/brain_langu
> age_dc_2 
> 
> The link above is to a news story about some recently published
> neurolinguistic research that found that Mandarin-speaking 
> listeners used
> both sides of their brains to perceive & interpret Mandarin 
> speech, whereas
> English speakers used only the left side to process English 
> speech.  This
> has apparently set off a lot of buzz about how Mandarin (or 
> "Chinese") is
> harder to learn than English is.
> 
> Is anyone familiar with this research?  I can't help but 
> wonder whether, if
> similar results were obtained in a study comparing, say, 
> Yoruba and English
> speakers, the media buzz would be the same.
> 
> Rudi 
> 
>