Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. This is Josh Weber, and I'm here with Dr. Marion, a professor of communication sciences and disorders and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She also directs the university's bilingualism and psycholinguistics research lab. I'm going to talk with her about her new work, the power of language. How the codes we use to think, speak, and live transform our minds. Language enables us to do more than to speak differently, but also think differently. Language we discover reading this book isn't limited to just verbal symbolism. One can also be fluent in math or music. Learning a new language can help us focus on the things that matter. Dr. Marion, welcome to write on radio.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: So I want to ask you a fun, interesting question that I've asked myself once, a couple of years ago when I was in the shower. I love for me, are there limitations to what thoughts can convey through know?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: The shower is a place where good ideas come to mind all the time.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: They're the best place.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question. Language and mind are interconnected. They are connected bi directionally. Many people don't realize that the languages we use shape how we think. And of course, what we think influences our language. And the question you're asking, you're not the only one who thought of it in the shower. There have been philosophers asking this question since the dawn of time. Can we have thoughts for which we don't have words?
Does language follow our thought, or does it actually shape our thought?
And I'm afraid I don't have the definite answer on the state of humanity there. But we do know that language has a very powerful effect on thought. It does guide how we think. It does shape our brain, both at the individual level and at the society level. It does influence how we perceive reality, the universe around us. It does influence how we remember. It even changes our bodies. So you can choose which of this direction you'd like us to go into, and we can talk about any of them.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Well, I want to ask you, because I know very early in the book, you talk about how I think some neuroscientists did research where they took sets of behavior data, I think, and ran it through computer algorithms and determined there are thought language restrictions. Is that true?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Correct.
If we zoom out and we think about the universe, we often think that there is this objective universe or objective reality out there that we all agree, and that is not the case. Reality really is this subjective experience that results from how our brains filter information from our senses, filter the input we receive, and combine it with our knowledge and experience.
And our knowledge and experience is. Language is a form of experience that gives us prism into what we see and how we perceive the world. There turns out, as you mentioned, from machine learning, that there are concepts that emerge that cluster together for which we don't have labels and things like perception and memory. We have separate words for them, but they are not separate. They really overlap in how they are represented both in our brain and in machine learning.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I really like. Because there's a point here, I think you talk about how what we think about as objective reality is really a perpetuation of the language you use in everyday life.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Correct.
There are so many examples we could use, but we could take a simple one like the rainbow.
If you're an english speaker, you think the rainbow has this set number of colors. We all learn growing up. You learn how to draw the rainbow with its colors. But in reality, the rainbow is an infinite number of colors on the color spectrum. It's this multitude of colors that changes by just one pixel. There is no clear demarcation between blue green or yellow orange. And yet, because of the labels we have, it changes how we think about the rainbow and that you don't have to be bilingual and multilingual to experience this effect. You don't have to speak languages that have different number, different words for color. If you are wine connoisseur or scotch connoisseur, or you work at a perfumery, or you're a chef who knows how to cook, you have a much richer vocabulary for sauces, for tastes, for smells, for finishes, for all of these variables that allow you to think, encode, represent, remember things differently. So someone who's not a foodie might not even notice the difference between two sauces or cannot tell the difference between this wine and that wine. Hey, it's all wine. Maybe the color is different. Whereas if someone who really has the vocabulary and understands it can remember flavors and can remember nuances that others don't, and these are small examples that we use from our daily experiences. Think about how more powerful this is if you think about language being a symbolic system in general, where it shapes everything about how we interact with the world.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: I want to talk to you about just a point you made very early on about memory and perception. Why does the vocabulary we use to describe them still need refinement?
I'm kind of getting the point here. You make how memory and perception are looking at brain scans are not really categorically distinct.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yeah, they are not. We think that memory and perception are distinct. But we don't have a modular mind. We don't have a mind like this part does perception, this part does memory. And we don't have areas in the brain that is only dedicated to x, y, or z. We have this network in the brain. And to your question, why do we need more precise terms, many words that we use now regularly?
We didn't have until we knew that those concepts even existed. We didn't have a word for million or billion or microscopic tiny things until we had that knowledge. So words and knowledge kind of go hand in hand, right, in that way. And emotion is another thing that some people can relate to. Sometimes having a label and a word for an emotion really helps us understand how we feel and helps us process our emotions.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: This book neatly packs together your research on language and the mind seen through the prism of multilingualism. You wrote this book in English. I was wondering if you could talk about how you drew on your knowledge of Romanian and the russian language.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Sure. So, I am originally from Moldova. Moldova is a country nobody in the United States had ever heard about up until about a year ago. Unfortunately, for very not good reasons, we now know where Moldova is. It's a small country between Ukraine and Romania.
Most of the citizens, including myself, are mostly ethnically Romanian. So I spoke Romanian at home. But it's the eastern part of Romania that was a soviet territory. It was a soviet republic. So Russian was the official language. I went to russian childcare. I spoke Russian as most businesses. So those are the two languages I grew up with, and I speak without an accent. Then I later quiet English, which I'm fluent in, but have an accent. And then I have a bunch of other languages that I couldn't probably give this interview in, that I could get myself into trouble in, but not out of trouble.
And all of these languages really do influence how I think and how I write and the examples I drew from when I wrote this book. Most of my examples come from United States, Europe, russian, romanian cultures, a lot of other as well. But they shape my thinking to a large extent. So I often say that I wouldn't have been able to write this book in any language other than English. I don't have the vocabulary, the professional vocabulary to talk about psycholinguistics or neuroscience, for example, in Romanian and English. But also those languages in my mind are associated with this definitive gender roles that are much stronger in those languages than the United States. Of course, we often talk about how much further we still need to come. And yes, we do, but we are further along than the role of the gender roles that exist in other countries where women can't not only write books, but even go to school sometimes. So I feel fortunate that I was able to have access to this linguistic and cultural framework that allowed me to communicate in this book.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: So why are we just beginning to understand the multilingual mind? And what are the dangers of leaving out multilingual research?
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Many reasons why? Partly because we didn't really understand that a multilingualism, and I use multilingualism both as bilinguals and multilinguals as one term. Multilingualism is the norm for the human condition. The majority of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual. More than half of the world's population speaks more than one language. We often forget that. So we used to think in science that monolingualism is the norm, and we would study the mind, the human mind, through this monolingual prism. And this is similar to studying heart disease or diabetes just in man or just in white people. We now know that heart disease manifests differently in women than in men. Sugar is processed differently in populations indigenous to north and South America than it is not in those populations. By the same token, if we only study monolingual minds, we get not only an incomplete and inaccurate, but really completely incorrect understanding of the human mind and the human potential.
How well equipped our brains are to combine multiple sources of information, integrate them, and optimize that knowledge and build on it to advance human potential even further.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: A way to think about language that I don't think a lot of people usually do is as codes. Math, music, spoken language, sign language, our brains are designed to interpret many different codes of communication. How does learning another language open more ways of coding reality?
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah, so language. We usually think of language just as natural languages. But if you think of language as a symbolic system, which is what language is, language allows us to use symbols to encode, transmit, and decode information. Right now, my brain, my mind has all of these thoughts and ideas and concepts, and I use words as symbols to encode those information, transmit them via these airwaves to other brains to decode. And by the same token, math is a symbolic language. Music is a symbolic language that allow. These are symbolic systems that allow us to communicate across time and space.
They have both similarities and differences in how they shape our brain. But in general, across the more symbolic systems we have, the better it is for our brain, both at the individual level and the social level.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: I think we've all heard stories from people where friends or relatives or multilingual will revert to using their native language when experiencing high emotions. How do our minds make different, emotionally driven decisions across language?
[00:11:38] Speaker B: That's a really interesting question. It is true that people who speak different languages often report filling differently, thinking differently, remembering things differently across languages. And now research corroborates this individual experiences. The native language is often tied more closely to emotion, and the second language is a little bit less so. And this influences things that what we remember, what we think of, and even our decision making in areas as broad as financial allocations, cheating, morality, decision making.
I'll give you one example from the decision making literature on morality and ethics. So there's this famous trolley dilemma you may have heard of. But in one version of the trolley dilemma, you see this train coming down the tracks, and there are five workers working on the railroad, working on the tracks, and this train is about to run them over. The only way to save these five people for you who are standing on the footbridge above the tracks, is to push this very large person who's standing next to you with a very large backpack to push them onto the tracks.
So the question is, is it permissible to push this one person off the tracks to save the life of five people? What would you say?
[00:13:07] Speaker A: I would say so, yes, you would.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Well, some people would, some people won't. And there is no right or wrong answer. It really depends what guides your decision. But the interesting thing is that people who speak more than one language are more likely to say that, yes, it is permissible to sacrifice the life of one to save the life of many if they asked in their non native language, about 20% say that it's permissible in their native language, and about 33% say that it's permissible in their second language. This 13% jump comes simply from switching languages, really showing how powerful the effect of language can be. Now, again, there's really no right or wrong answer. It depends on what drives your decision making process. On the one hand, there is this utilitarian decision making where you may think that the consequences weren't the actions, the greater benefit to the greater number of people. And then on the other hand, you might say there is right and wrong irrespective of what the consequences are. And we see those decision play out on both individual and large social scales all the time.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: I want to change gears a little bit and ask you about the relationship between multilingualism and creativity. What have we seen in scores for creative tasks or divergent thinking with people who have multilingual skills.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is an area that people have individually talked about in the past, often saying that they feel differently, they create things differently, they write differently across languages. But there hasn't been a lot of careful, empirical research on that until recently.
We now are studying down this path of looking at, partly because it's hard to define creativity and hard to measure it. But if you use some of the standard tests that I use to measure divergent thinking, you see that people who speak more than one language tend to perform to score higher on this test, various tests of creativity. And that seems to be because they are able to draw connections between things in ways that other people who don't speak those languages can. So they see connections, they see similarities between things in ways that others don't. And there are ways to explain that. If you think about features that our concepts consist of. So every feature. So, if you think of a bike, for example, the concept of bike has multiple features in it. It has handlebars, it has wheels. You use it to get from point a to point b. All of those are features that represent the concept bike. But those concepts, those features vary across languages. So if you're a dutch speaker, where bikes are this ubiquitous mode of transportation everywhere, all the time, your representation of bike might also include a couple of kids juggled on various parts of the bike or a basket in the front. If you speak French, maybe your concept of bike also includes a baguette in that basket.
I'm stereotyping. But now, if you speak all of those languages, now, suddenly the wheels of the bike, in your mind, are represented closer together to a baguette than someone who doesn't speak those languages. And this is a small one example, but if you think about the huge lexicon that we have across languages, you can see how some word meanings overlap and some words translate differently across languages. And that changes our ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: In your chapter, another language, another soul, you say that multilinguals often become somewhat different versions of themselves when they speak another language. It's as if we have multiple versions of ourselves that coexisted internally. What has your research discovered about this?
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So, language is very closely tied to culture. Language and culture are interconnected, and it's also tied to our daily experiences. So, for example, when we ask, in our experiments, we ask people to talk about their childhood memories or describe events, just narratives of all sorts. And then we later analyze them. We see that they speak about themselves differently in one language versus another. So, in a language that's associated with a more individualistic culture, the main agent of the story is usually I, me, myself and mine. And there are more personal pronouns, and they are more sort of the actor, that protagonist in the story of their life. Whereas when the same person speaks a language associated with a more collectivist culture, there is more of we as ours, more of a group identity that comes through in their stories. So it even shapes how we think of ourselves, of our lives, the stories we tell about our lives, and what else is our life. Mostly this combination of stories we tell ourselves.
It does shape our identity by emphasizing different cultural values.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Really, what effect can language have in politics and advertising? I was shocked in reading this, that the political leanings of multilingual persons can change depending on which language they use.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Yeah, this is tied to what we previously said about decision making and memories, even personality tests. There are all this agreeableness, extroversion, introversion. People who speak multiple languages sometimes score differently on those tests depending on which language they take the tests in again, because different aspects of their personality come forward. Language is this frame of reference, and you switch frames of reference and suddenly you remember different things and different values carry more weight than others in politics and advertisement and any kind of personal relationships. You don't even have to be bilingual or multilingual to experience the power of language. Simply relabeling things or using certain labels can change how people vote, the verdicts they give, how they think about themselves, the relationships we live with, that every single day of our lives. People are paid a great deal of money to write just the right slogan or just the right speech to get us to experience certain emotions or respond in a certain way.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: My last question for you, and it's pretty big, there's been a lot of coverage in the news with Chad GBT. It's a large language model using artificial intelligence to hold text conversations with users. And as a person who studies language, what are your worries? Popes questions with Chad GPT.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: So I didn't talk in my book about it because I wrote the book before Chad GPT came through. But I would like to suggest, encourage you and all your readers to look for my editorial in the Washington Post about multilingualism and Chad GPT that I'm currently writing.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Amazing. Great.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: I know, I've been thinking about it. I love the topic, I love the question.
I have things to say and if you want, we can talk about know. I want to have them have since they know what those rights and then doing that. I want them to have the first debate, but I'm happy to come back anytime to talk to you about.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: I would love for that. Absolutely.
[00:20:48] Speaker B: That'd be great.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: I'm Josh Weber, and you've been listening to me chat with Dr. Mary about her new book, the Power of language, is available now anywhere books are sold. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: My pleasure.
