![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Random ling stuff
Jun. 16th, 2005 06:50 pmI was reading an excellent excerpt from a book by Terence W. Deacon, "The Symbolic Species". It's the reading my students have to do for the cog sci class I am starting to teach next week, and so I thought it would be good for me to read it, too :-) The chapter (#4) has a lot of different stuff, including child learning and neural nets, which I found very enlightening.
Other than that, there was a mention of the fact that complete bilinguals have two different centers in the brain for the two languages they speak. I don't know how many centers I have; the only thing I know for sure is which languages interfere with each other in my mind, and which do not. English never interferes with anything. Neither does Russian (there is one exception). Only the languages that I do not speak on a daily basis mix with each other. Thus, when trying to remember Spanish after a year of Arabic, Arabic words were trying to get into the Spanish sentences. Spanish and German mix much less after I lived in Germany (but, I mean, it's not really possible that at the beginning I had one center for Spanish and German, and then they started separating, or is it?).
One weird exception to all this is Serbian. While it does not mix with English or anything else, it has a tendency to insert words into my Russian sentences. I can only explain it with the fact that Russian and Serbian are so similar; they must build on the same base in my head. You know, some people told me stories that sometimes they start speaking Russian to an English speaker without realizing it, or vice versa, or inserting Russian words into English sentences - and it's never happened to me. But I do insert Serbian words into Russian sentences or vice versa (more common Serbian words into Russian sentences) without paying any attention to it. There are two categories of words here: one is interjections, or very common phrases such as "you know" or "well". I insert them and only later realize that it was Serbian, not Russian. Words in the other category are words that my parents have to tell me don't exist in Russian. It's quite amusing - it could be a perfectly good Russian word, and most likely that root is used in Russian, too, just with a different prefix. And my parents go "Zhenya, that's not a word of the Russian language".
Another interesting thing is which levels of language are the same for all languages and which are different. These are just things I noticed myself doing. Phonology is different for every language, and I have to consciously switch from one system to the other. Have you noticed how difficult it is sometimes to say a Russian word with Russian pronounciation in the middle of an English sentence? It's like stumbling over something while walking. I find that with Russian and Serbian, too (since the systems are similar, but not quite). I think most people living in a country, other than their country of origin (depends on when they came there, of course) have noticed this, too: when nervous, or overly emotional, my long-forgotten Russian accent comes up in a foreign language. My mother-in-law, when too emotional, starts speaking in the Dalmatian dialect (it's all [i] instead of [e]), while usually she speaks in the Belgrade dialect; it's really cool.
For intonation, it's not too clear to me. I know that my Russian intonation has been greatly affected by my English (that's the first thing that goes after a week in Moscow), but my Serbian intonation is very Serbian (maybe because Filip's Serbian intonation didn't change, I don't know). Word access seems to be just on the "most frequently used" basis. It really drives me crazy sometimes when I can't remember the right word in the right language.
Other than that, there was a mention of the fact that complete bilinguals have two different centers in the brain for the two languages they speak. I don't know how many centers I have; the only thing I know for sure is which languages interfere with each other in my mind, and which do not. English never interferes with anything. Neither does Russian (there is one exception). Only the languages that I do not speak on a daily basis mix with each other. Thus, when trying to remember Spanish after a year of Arabic, Arabic words were trying to get into the Spanish sentences. Spanish and German mix much less after I lived in Germany (but, I mean, it's not really possible that at the beginning I had one center for Spanish and German, and then they started separating, or is it?).
One weird exception to all this is Serbian. While it does not mix with English or anything else, it has a tendency to insert words into my Russian sentences. I can only explain it with the fact that Russian and Serbian are so similar; they must build on the same base in my head. You know, some people told me stories that sometimes they start speaking Russian to an English speaker without realizing it, or vice versa, or inserting Russian words into English sentences - and it's never happened to me. But I do insert Serbian words into Russian sentences or vice versa (more common Serbian words into Russian sentences) without paying any attention to it. There are two categories of words here: one is interjections, or very common phrases such as "you know" or "well". I insert them and only later realize that it was Serbian, not Russian. Words in the other category are words that my parents have to tell me don't exist in Russian. It's quite amusing - it could be a perfectly good Russian word, and most likely that root is used in Russian, too, just with a different prefix. And my parents go "Zhenya, that's not a word of the Russian language".
Another interesting thing is which levels of language are the same for all languages and which are different. These are just things I noticed myself doing. Phonology is different for every language, and I have to consciously switch from one system to the other. Have you noticed how difficult it is sometimes to say a Russian word with Russian pronounciation in the middle of an English sentence? It's like stumbling over something while walking. I find that with Russian and Serbian, too (since the systems are similar, but not quite). I think most people living in a country, other than their country of origin (depends on when they came there, of course) have noticed this, too: when nervous, or overly emotional, my long-forgotten Russian accent comes up in a foreign language. My mother-in-law, when too emotional, starts speaking in the Dalmatian dialect (it's all [i] instead of [e]), while usually she speaks in the Belgrade dialect; it's really cool.
For intonation, it's not too clear to me. I know that my Russian intonation has been greatly affected by my English (that's the first thing that goes after a week in Moscow), but my Serbian intonation is very Serbian (maybe because Filip's Serbian intonation didn't change, I don't know). Word access seems to be just on the "most frequently used" basis. It really drives me crazy sometimes when I can't remember the right word in the right language.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dariadmitrievna
