S1 E11: Dr. Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim on how bilinguals’ brains differ from monolinguals’, and how bilingualism improves performance at other tasks.

This week, Dr. Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim brings some excellent news for bilinguals! Find out how speaking another language makes your brain more efficient, as early as infancy. You do not want to miss this one.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Ashley Chung-Fat-Yim is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the neural and cognitive consequences of bilingualism. During her PhD, she was awarded the ThinkSwiss Research Award and Mitacs Globalink Research Award to conduct research abroad at the Institute of Multilingualism in Fribourg, Switzerland. Before her postdoctorate position at Northwestern University, Ashley earned her PhD from York University in Psychology.

https://sites.google.com/site/ashleykchungfatyim/

TERMS

• Mauritian
• Mauritius
• Creole
• Monolinguals
• Bilinguals
• Psycholinguistics
• WEIRD samples

MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:

The Power of Language - Dr. Viorica Marian

TAKEAWAYS:

1. Many immigrants pride themselves on working hard, contributing to their adopted country, and assimilating to the best of their ability.
2. When we move out, our parents can’t be responsible for our safety and success anymore. This sometimes helps them relax and shift into a more supportive role rather than actively worrying 24/7.
3. We can’t always articulate our need for diversity. Even though Dr. Chung-Fat-Yim never experienced overt racism, moving to a school with more Asian kids was a welcome change.
4. Both Dr. Chung-Fat-Yim and Sherry feel that moving to the U.S. made them more aware of their Asianness and their status as a minority.
5. Sexism is alive and well in academia. If you see your female colleagues’ ideas shot down, then applauded when coming from a male, speak up and give the female colleague due credit.
6. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research is driven by questions posed by people like Dr. Chung-Fat-Yim, whose unique backgrounds help identify gaps in psycholinguistics that are only beginning to be filled.
7. In a bilingual brain, there isn’t a switch to use one language or the other. Rather, every language is activated at the same time, and we have to inhibit all of them except the one we want to use.
8. Bilinguals’ language processing areas of the brain develop more grey matter and white matter. This translates to better performance on both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Bilinguals also process some information faster than monolinguals and can be observed even in infants who have not yet acquired language, but who live in a bilingual household.
9. Some cultures place more emphasis on the tone of voice to detect or express emotions, while others rely more on facial expression.
10. It does not matter at what age you start learning a language, you can reap the benefits of bilingualism as long as you keep practicing and maintain fluency.
11. Using the Duo Lingo app is as effective as doing brain training exercises and leads to improvements in performance in older adults.
12. If you learn a new language later in life, you experience the foreign language effect, where you process things with more emotional distance in the new language than in your native tongue.

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Hosts: Ariadne Mila & Sherry-Lynn Lee

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