Speaking French in German Class: non -- nein!

In college I double majored in Psychology and French, so I am fluent in French to this day. A few years ago my family and I spent a year in Denmark so I started to learn Danish. To my horror when I would try to speak Danish, French words would pop into my mind. More recently, I have been learning German. It is so frustrating to only find Danish words when I am searching my brain for German vocabulary! If you have ever tried to learn a foreign language this week's meme should be relatable:

If we assume that the Most Interesting Man in the World learned French first and it is making German hard for him to learn, then this is an example of proactive interference. Proactive interference is the situation when prior knowledge interrupts the learning of new information.

How can we overcome this? Past research suggests that people learning a second language have to inhibit their original languages to produce the new one. So my stories and our meme represent failures in this inhibition. 

An article by Declerck, Thoma, Koch, and Philipp (2015) supports the idea that people who are fluent in multiple languages also must use inhibition. Declerck et al. tested 18 German young adults who grew up speaking both Turkish and German as part of their everyday lives. These individuals also started to learn English in school around age ten, so they were fluent in this third language, although these skills were not as strong as their Turkish and German abilities.

In their experiment, the participants were shown slides depicting a number (1-9) and a symbol. If they saw a square they should say the number in Turkish; if they saw a diamond they should say the number in German; if they saw a triangle they should say the number in English. Each participant experienced 107 trials of this test. For some trials two cued languages alternated in sets of three (for example, German-Turkish-German) and for an equal amount of trials all three of the the cued languages cycled in sets of three (for example, German-Turkish-English). For all trials the speed and accuracy of the answers were recorded: a longer hesitation before saying the number indicated more inhibition of the previously cued language. 

Participants hesitated milliseconds more when two cued languages alternated, as compared to when all three cued languages cycled. This finding supports past research: alternating back and forth between two languages is most likely to increase the difficulty of suppressing one of the languages when using the other. This difficulty increases the response time.

All three languages created these tiny delays for speaking the next cued language, but the participants' dominant languages, Turkish and German, did this more than English. This also supports the idea of inhibition: a language that is stronger in your mind will take more effort to suppress which will slow down your response.

On the other hand, participants were most accurate in naming the numbers when cued to do so in English. In this case more mistakes were made when they had to speak their two strongest languages! The authors explain this counter-intuitive finding by pointing out that a person who is very strong in two languages (Turkish and German) will likely view this experiment as a test of the language that has weaker fluency (English). It is as if the participants were not so worried about being accurate in Turkish or German because those are easy-peasy for them; instead they were worried about goofing up in English so they tried harder when English was cued. This activation of English would decrease response time and also increase accuracy of naming numbers in that language.

This should make us all of us aspiring polyglots feel better. For second-language learners, don't be too hard on yourself if words from your native language pop out of your mouth in a foreign language class. This is just a problem of proactive interference and a failure of inhibition. For multilingual people, don't feel bad if you catch yourself hesitating ever so slightly as you switch between your languages. This only shows that your brain is working hard to inhibit the languages that you don't need at that moment. Moreover, the situation is going to play a role by activating a specific language which should increase your accuracy.

Further Reading:

You can access the Declerck et al. (2015) article at your local college library.

If you feel inspired to brush up on an old language or to learn a new one, two FREE apps that use cognitive psychological research for language learning are Memrise and Duolingo.

A Radiolab episode on Translation. Featuring Indiana University's Dr. Douglas Hofstadter attempts to translate a French poem into English, and other examples of how ideas can get lost, or changed, in translation.