RESEARCH UNCOVERED
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n recent months, the impact of the war in Syria has been moving closer to our shores, as people forced to flee their homes in the Middle East make their way to Europe in search of safety and, ultimately, a new life. In the first nine months of 2015, Belgium registered 22,266 refugees, all of whom will need to find a way to integrate in their new society, wherever they end up. One of the most important factors in successful integration in a foreign land is acquiring the language of the host community. So far this year, 9,400 people have taken part in official language classes provided for refugees in Belgium, but it’s thought that at least 7,500 more will be in need of Dutch language training in the coming months. With this in mind, two researchers at the department of linguistics and literary studies explain how learning an additional language brings benefits not just socially but also cognitively. Put simply, those who speak more than one language are smarter than those who speak just the one. Professor Alex Housen specialises in multilingualism and language learning. With other members of the 20-strong Multi-L research team, he studies various aspects of foreign language acquisition, the process that leads to multilingualism. “Our research is sociological, psychological, cognitive and neurological,” he explains. “We look at all the factors that determine how people learn additional languages. We also study multilingualism: what it does to the brain, and to people’s personalities and how they perceive the world, because there’s an intimate connection between language and thought.”
Look into my eyes Examining what exactly happens to the brain and the mind when a person learns new elements in a language is a challenging task. Recent advances in neuroimaging allow researchers to visualise the structure and some of the operations of the brain as it performs certain cognitively demanding tasks, such as comprehending, speaking or learning language. But these techniques aren’t always feasible for investigating the many very specific cognitive processes involved in language learning. To this end, Multi-L members are experimenting with other research methods. “We look at mechanisms like attention and awareness, which are thought to play an important role,” Housen says, “and we think we’ve found a way of measuring how much cognitive effort the mind has to make
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HENRI DECEMBER 2015
Professor Alex Housen and his colleagues are based in the ideal city to study multilingualism.
when it learns a new language, by looking at eye movements.” To explore this, he and his team have used a procedure using a headset with cameras that tracks the movement of a subject’s eyes while they read sentences in a second language on a computer screen. This can be a natural language like English, an artificially created language, or a semi-artificial language such as Englishti, the version of English that Housen’s colleague Hannelore Simoens created to investigate exactly THOSE WHO what it is that makes some elements SPEAK MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE in a language – like word endings and ARE SMARTER conjugations – more difficult to learn than others. “The eyes make all kinds of movements as we read sentences in this partly familiar and partly new language, so we look at how long they focus on certain elements or how often they go back to them, for example,” he explains. “All these movements reflect different cognitive processes. This is new research that’s drawing quite a lot of attention and we’ve already had some publications based on our eye-tracking studies.”
Smarter kids Of course, multilingual Brussels is the perfect place to study various aspects of language acquisition; indeed, the VUB was the first university in the world