Prevents excessive zeal to learn languages Bashny.Net

Concentrating on a foreign language, we remember more words, but worse to digest his grammar.

It is known that adults can be much harder to learn a foreign language than children. One of the reasons it is believed that children learn it – or rather, they are forced to learn – with great zeal, while the adults are always some other business and concerns. Anyway, adults can just be lazy, and nobody won't tell them anything. However, researchers from mit believe that adults have difficulty with foreign languages, not because I try too little, but because they are trying too hard.





In the experiments Amy Finn (Amy S. Finn) and her colleagues was attended by several dozen people that asked for 10 minutes to listen to words and phrases in an artificial language. The dictionary of this language consisted of two syllables, nine words, and all words sound the structure was divided into three groups. In recording words many went in groups without interruption, that is, immediately after the word group And word group And then the words of the group S. While the person was listening to "foreign language", he was distracted by the color rebus that he couldn't fully concentrate on a foreign language.

In another variant, the conditions were different: one third of the volunteers had to remember the words heard, the third – to distinguish between different groups of words (A, b and C) in sound, finally in the last group, the participants of the experiment was to understand how the groups are formed of words, that is, to formulate a grammatical rule. In the second experiment do not disturb anyone, moreover, a man asked me to give the signal if suddenly it seemed to him that he finally remembered a word or found something in common among several words – so you can be sure that the participants of the experiment, all their attention is paid to the language task. After the test results of those who tried to perform a specific language task, compared with those who are no tasks were set, and which simultaneously listening to words solved the color puzzle.

As write the authors in PLoS ONE, focus on the material helped memorize vocabulary, but bothered to understand grammar. Groups of the second experiment were compared with a group from the first experiment, which, as mentioned above, distracted during language exercises. Those who are told just to memorize the words, learn 20% more. On the contrary, those who need to understand grammatical rule, showed 20% worst result, if fully focused on the task.

In fact, psychologists and linguists since the 90-ies of XX century discuss a hypothesis that explains the failure of adults in foreign languages too advanced (compared to children) prefrontal cortex of the brain. Brain development requires too much information to analyze, trying to take into account all the nuances of the external stimulus, current tasks, and when learning a foreign language is not always a good thing. The hypothesis became very popular, but experimental evidence she was not – until this day.

We can say that the results, at least indirectly, the hypothesis is confirmed: full concentration on the task, "the attempt to consider all the data" do not always help to understand a different language. Amy Finn colleagues believe that different aspects of language are processed in different parts of the memory, and for certain species deliberate conscious attempts to remember something only does harm. It is possible that getting to the grammar, we do not need to completely dwell on it, and, like children, occasionally for something to distract or even to do it in parallel with some other things.

However, the researchers urged not to do hasty training and methodological insights from the data – if we just ask for a rest more often when learning a foreign language, it's easy to slip into laziness.

Source: nkj.ru