Letters to the editor:bilingualHot

Letters to the editor:bilingual

文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html

Processing language文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html

Johnson’s column on losing native languages was outstanding (January 29th). It is true that a multilingual person’s “first language is the one most imbued with emotions.” Our “mother tongue” seems to be stored in both the procedural (more emotionally based) and explicit (or verbal) parts of our brains. Subsequent languages have fewer connections to procedural memory, where neurons are fully myelinated at birth, in contrast with those of explicit memory, which are myelinated during the first three years of life.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html

Ribot’s law refers to the clinical finding that people with brain dysfunction may have their first language skills preserved intact. In 1843, Jacques Lordat described a priest from Languedoc whose brain damage created profound language deficits, but only in French, his second language. His native Occitan was unaffected.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html

Such clinical findings offer a fascinating window into the way our brains process language. In his book on aphasia, Sigmund Freud made the controversial but now generally accepted claim that language is processed in multiple brain regions.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html

RICHARD WAUGAMAN
Clinical professor of psychiatry
Georgetown University
Washington, DC文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html 文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/8557.html