BooksReviewAn eloquent but relentless attempt to prove the superiority of polyglots fails to convince
Disclosure: this reviewer is pi-lingual, a word coined by Douglas Hofstadter to describe people who speak three languages and can also have a cringingly inept conversation with a taxi driver in a couple more. Any book like this one, which purports to prove scientifically that polyglots are superior, has my vote. All the more since no great diligence was required of me to achieve this, aside from tagging along with my parents and a couple of patient English girlfriends met at an impressionable age. I therefore picked up this account of the virtues of multilingualism in smug mode, channelling my son who, at age 7, was fond of starting conversations with strangers with “I speak three languages, how many do you speak?”, which unsurprisingly won him few friends.
I was not prepared for the number of scientific reasons this (overlong) book provides for additional smugness and fewer friends. Viorica Marian, who was born in Moldova, speaking Russian and Romanian, immigrated to the US and is now a professor at Northwestern University, has clearly made a living out of making monolingual colleagues – which in her neck of the woods must be a majority – feel inadequate. The first half of The Power of Language is a relentless, and eloquently written, studies-have-shown gallop through her work and that of her peers. All of which supposedly demonstrates, ad nauseam, that polyglots are measurably better than monoglots at almost everything: smarter, more inventive, more adaptable.
They also have less (and later) dementia, more emotional detachment in their learned languages, better “multisensory integration” and their brain has been literally reshaped by language. Some of the statements made are hair-raisingly daft – only a closeted academic could write: “Authors of a recent study suggest that the memory abilities of an 80‐year‐old woman with a bachelor’s degree would be on average as good as those of a 60‐year‐old woman with a high school education and interpreted the four extra years of education as making up for the memory losses associated with 20 years of ageing”. This is ivory tower tosh. University education has nothing in particular to do with memory, and memory loss with age very little to do with university education. Cultures with oral traditions demanded prodigious feats of memory from their storytellers and listeners, and awarded no bachelor’s degrees that I’ve heard of.
The superiority of polyglots is supported by dozens of scientific articles reporting various clever experimental psychological tests and further articles measuring changes in blood flow in different areas of the brain using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI for short. None of this, by the way, tallies with my own experience. I have quite simply never noticed a difference in anything nontrivial between the people I know who speak many languages and those who do not. But science, according to Prof Marian, tells us otherwise. And that is where the problem lies, because the science may be bunk.
Psychology and fMRI are both going through what is politely known in the trade as a “replication crisis” meaning that many studies claiming statistically significant results – effects that could not have arisen by chance – cannot be reproduced by other researchers. Much soul-searching is going on at the moment and the consensus is that practitioners need to up their game.
Some of the field’s contradictions are evident in this book: all of fMRI is predicated on the notion that a brain area that performs a task lights up in the images produced by the machine. Yet Marian asserts “polyglots and hyperpolyglots used fewer neural resources to process language. [They] may be making more efficient use of neural resources for language processing”. In other words, if it lights up it’s working – and if it doesn’t light up it’s working even better. You see the problem.
Midway through the book Marian switches gears from her area of expertise to a broader and shallower survey of language in general, which reads, at times, like a grab-bag of factoids. Spanish has two words to refer to a corner, one from the inside (rincòn) and one from the outside (esquina). We are told that as a result: “Speakers of Spanish have better memory for where items are presented in a display that involves corners than speakers of English”. If you believe that, as the Duke of Wellington said to a man who addressed him as “Mr Jones, I believe”, you’ll believe anything.
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