The special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a time of crisis”, which originally motivated the call for contributions to this series, has now been published and all the papers are available for free access.

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Covid-related misinformation in Morocco

African sayings related to crocodiles – the author at the Agadir Crocodile Park

The Moroccan Institute for Policy Analysis has just published a report entitled “Moroccans and Quarantine: General satisfaction and cautious optimism”. The findings show considerable negative psychological effects of the pandemic despite the fact that most Moroccans are satisfied with the government’s measures to keep the epidemic under control. One of the reasons for this discrepancy may be information overload.

Since the beginning of the lockdown in Morocco on March 20, 2020, information and misinformation have abounded, and it has not been easy to distinguish between these two.

The closure of schools, cafes, hammams, restaurants, and mosques, together with the ban on mass gatherings, inter-city travel, parties and family celebrations have helped to keep the spread of the virus under control. But they have also been controversial and deprived people of functioning normally in a society.

Moroccans’ sources of information – and misinformation – have been social media, national and international TV channels, the internet, and communications from a range of social actors and groupings.

Social media, in particular, provide the ideal platform for the dissemination of misinformation.

The mimesis power of disinformation

The Covid-19 infodemic can be approached as a synthesis of concepts: a static signified (COVID-19) and a dynamic signifier (misinformation) are transformed in local, regional and global contexts.

Globalization has promised Moroccans – as many others around the world – wealth and prosperity together with equality and respect. Unfortunately, these have turned out to be chimeras. How is anyone to know that the measures taken to curb the spread of COVID-19 are not another such chimera?

Misinformation is like a carcinogenic cell that duplicates irrational and implausible facts, and then transforms them into a growth of seemingly trustworthy and verified information via social media. Misinformation is fueled by a melange of a bit of reality and a lot of chimeras.

It is in the nucleus where the misinformation is duplicated, echoed and confabulated into a form of neo-information or malignant misinformation that mimics the style, the content, and the source of credible information. Once the target audience has become trapped, the reptilian and emotional brain does not have the time or capacity to think critically due to cognitive overload. Thus, misinformation proliferates because the human brain is prone to cognitive bias and dissonance.

Lack of timely high-quality information is the perfect niche for misinformation to get a foot in the door and from there to create a web of lies and half-truths for the anguished and traumatized of this world for whom the pandemic is yet another disaster that incomprehensibly befalls them from afar.

The crocodile giggles while we paddle with the stream, as the proverb says.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here.

Preschool in Karlsruhe, Germany (Source: DW)

Ever since my research for my 2002 book Bilingual Couples Talk I’ve regularly been told by people – or been asked to confirm their belief – that a cross-cultural relationship is beneficial once the couple have children. The children are expected to not only be bilingual but also to enjoy cognitive advantages from growing up with more than one culture and to be more open minded and better communicators. I’ve always struggled how to respond because, of course, nothing is ever this simple. A 2011 study of the cognitive and linguistic abilities of various groups of preschoolers in Germany confirms the assumption – children of intermarried couples outperform all other groups on a cognitive ability test – and, simultaneously, explain why it is a fallacy that confounds ethnicity and class.

The study by Birgit Becker examines the cognitive and linguistic abilities of three- and four-year-olds with different types of parents:

• Children whose parents and grandparents were all born in Germany (the ‘native’ group)
• Children whose parents were both born in Turkey (the ‘second generation’)
• Children whose parents were both born in Germany but each parent had at least one parent born in Turkey (the ‘third generation’)
• Children with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent (the ‘2A generation’)
• Children with one ‘native’ parent and one first- or second generation Turkish parent (the ‘intermarried’ group)

The cognitive abilities of a total of 1,008 children were tested with the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. The German version of the test was used but it was administered by bilingual researchers and the children could choose to do the test in German, in Turkish or they could mix the two languages as they pleased. So, language proficiency is unlikely to confound test results here, as it so often does in cognitive testing of bilingual and minority children.

Adapted from Becker (2011, p. 448)

The diagram shows that the children from the intermarried group outperformed all the other groups, including the natives. It also shows that, with the exception of the intermarried group, all the other ‘Turkish’ groups performed significantly lower than the ‘native’ group. Children in the ‘2A group’ – with one first-generation and one second-generation Turkish parent – performed particularly poorly. In fact, ‘2A’ parents might be considered ‘intermarried,’ too; but, obviously, their intermarried status is not beneficial for the child.

Once the full diagram is revealed, part of the conundrum is solved.

Source: Becker (2011, p. 448)

Once parents’ socio-economic status (as measured by their level of education and their occupational status) and educational resources (as measured by the number of books in the home; the frequency of bedtime stories; or the number of visits to the zoo) are controlled, the ethnic differences disappear and the influence of all the above ethnic groups/generations is reduced to non-significance.

All group differences regarding children’s cognitive skills can be fully explained by families’ socioeconomic status and educational resources. (Becker 2011, p. 447)

What seems like an ethnic effect (‘children of intermarried couples are smarter’ or ‘German children are smarter than Turkish children’) is, in fact, an effect of socioeconomic status and educational resources; in other words, a well-known class effect. However, class maps onto ethnicity, in this case, as elsewhere. The vast majority of Turkish families in the sample, which can be assumed to be representative of Turks in Germany (or, at least, southwest Germany, where the study was conducted), are poorly educated, work in low-status occupations, and have few educational resources at their disposal.

As far as the two ‘mixed’ groups – ‘2A’ and ‘intermarried’ – are concerned a process of negative and positive selection can be assumed to apply respectively.

Having a first-generation mother and a second-generation father constitutes some sort of ‘double jeopardy’ for the child: the mother is much less likely to speak German than even first-generation women married to first-generation men; and the father is even less likely to have completed secondary education than other Turkish second-generation men. As the researcher explains, second-generation men who ‘import’ brides from the country of origin are likely to be negatively selected on various dimensions and their ‘imported’ brides will lack knowledge and resources that are useful to raising a child in the destination country.

By contrast, a process of positive selection works in favor of a child with a native and a migrant parent. Not only will the native parent ‘automatically’ have country-specific knowledge and resources but the migrant parent is likely to be positively selected with regard to level of education, proficiency in German, and general ‘openness’ and ‘integration.’ This is particularly true in the case German-Turkish intermarriages, which are comparatively rare and only account for five percent of all marriages of first- and second-generation Turks in Germany.

In sum, if intermarriage is an expression of parental cosmopolitanism, it is beneficial for children. Not because there is any intrinsic value in intermarriage but because that is how educational reproduction works: well-educated parents with stable jobs, parents who read to their children and who engage in a wide range of family activities confer an advantage on their children. It is just that the advantages – as well as the injuries – of class are increasingly mapped onto ethnicity, race or ‘culture.’

Becker, B. (2011). Cognitive and Language Skills of Turkish Children in Germany: A Comparison of the Second and Third Generation and Mixed Generational Groups International Migration Review, 45 (2), 426-459 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00853.x

Multilingual Hyderabad (Source: Wikimedia)

It is by now widely known that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia. What is less widely known is the fact that this knowledge is almost exclusively derived from Canadian research conducted by Ellen Bialystok and her team (e.g., Bialystock et al., 2007). The data for these studies come from comparing monolingual English-speaking native-born Canadian dementia sufferers with their bilingual counterparts. The bilinguals are all migrants to Canada who had learned English during adolescence or young adulthood and come from a variety of first-language backgrounds with Central and Eastern Europeans predominating.

This data base raises an obvious problem: is it bilingualism that delays the onset of dementia or is it the fact of migration or other confounding variables?

Research published in Neurology last week addresses exactly this bias in a study of the relationship between bilingualism and onset of dementia in a non-migrant population in India. The researchers, Alladi et al., investigated age at onset of dementia in a group of more than 600 dementia sufferers in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad constitutes a highly diverse linguistic environment: the official languages of Andhra Pradesh are Telugu and Urdu; English and Hindi are widely spoken due to their official status on the national level; other languages with significant numbers of speakers include Tamil, Marathi and Kannada.

Bi- and multilingualism are indigenous to Hyderabad – as they are to most of India – and bi- and multilinguals do not systematically differ from monolinguals on migration status or other variables.

In this cohort, the researchers found that the onset of dementia in the bilingual population was delayed by 4.5 years (a finding very similar to the 4.3 years found by Bialystok et al. in Canada).

A variable that often correlates with bilingualism in these studies is education and here Alladi et al. are also breaking new ground by including an illiterate cohort. Among illiterates (defined as people without any formal education), the protective effect of bilingualism was even greater: the onset of dementia in bilingual illiterates was 6 years later than in their monolingual counterparts.

Why does speaking more than one language have these protective effects? Having to switch between languages on a regular basis enhances “executive control:” making frequent linguistic choices – activating one language and suppressing another – is a form of practicing cognitive multitasking. Like other forms of cognitive practice – participating in continuing education, undertaking stimulating intellectual activities, engaging in physical exercise – bilingualism thus contributes to an individual’s “cognitive reserve” and wards off the effects of aging a bit longer.

Confirmation that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia in a different bilingual population than the one studied to date is good news for bilinguals.

Even more importantly, the study by Alladi et al. makes a significant contribution to bilingualism research by extending the evidence base to a population with a very different sociolinguistic profile from the one that predominates in the literature. Even so, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to bilingualism still have a long way to go before they will truly meet.

The gap between the psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics of bilingualism is nicely illustrated by another of Alladi et al.’s findings: in the Hyderabad sample, the protective effect of bilingualism does not increase with speaking more than two languages, i.e. from the perspective of the delayed onset of dementia, trilingualism or quadrilingualism do not offer any more benefits than bilingualism. This finding is in contrast to another Canadian study (Chertkow et al., 2010). Those researchers found – similarly to Bialystok et al. – that the onset of dementia was delayed in bilingual immigrants to Canada and in French-speaking Canadians. However, they did not find that bilingualism was similarly beneficial for English-speaking Canadians. In fact, in that study the onset of dementia was later in monolingual English-speaking Canadians than in bilingual English-speaking Canadians. For language learning and use to have a protective effect for English-speaking Canadians, they needed to be at least trilingual. Chertkow et al. concluded that bilingualism was sometimes beneficial in delaying the onset of dementia but multilingualism was always beneficial.

Alladi et al. draw on sociolinguistics, specifically language ideologies, to explain their differential findings:

In places in which an official dominant language coexists with a number of minority languages, it can be reasonably assumed that the amount of language switching between languages is proportional to the number of languages spoken: the more languages people know, the more occasion they will have to switch between them. In the strongly trilingual environment of Hyderabad with Telugu, [Urdu] and English being used extensively and interchangeably in both formal and informal environments, with high levels of code switching and mixing, it could be speculated that those speaking 2 languages have already reached a maximum level of switching and the knowledge of additional languages will not be able to increase it. Such an interpretation would be supported by the view that neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control demands in bilingual communities with high levels of code switching are different from bilingual communities with practice in avoiding language switching or mixing. (Alladi et al., 213, pp. 4f.)

One of the frustrating aspects of much psycholinguistic research addressing the cognitive advantages – or otherwise – of bi- and multilingualism lies in the fact that the findings of different researchers frequently conflict. As long as bi- and multilingualism are taken as unitary phenomena inherent in the individual, this will always be the case. Not only do we need to extend the evidence base to include different linguistic, cultural and national contexts, we also need to bring psycho- and sociolinguistic research together to get a better understanding of what “bilingualism” might actually mean in a particular context. Alladi et al. have taken a most welcome step in the right direction.

References

Alladi S, Bak TH, Duggirala V, Surampudi B, Shailaja M, Shukla AK, Chaudhuri JR, & Kaul S (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology PMID: 24198291
Bialystok E, Craik FI, & Freedman M (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45 (2), 459-64 PMID: 17125807
Chertkow H, Whitehead V, Phillips N, Wolfson C, Atherton J, & Bergman H (2010). Multilingualism (but not always bilingualism) delays the onset of Alzheimer disease: evidence from a bilingual community. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders, 24 (2), 118-25 PMID: 20505429

Practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division may seem language-neutral. However, in the course of practicing them with my child I’ve discovered that they are not and that the different word formation patterns of English and German number words partly defeats my purpose of achieving greater automaticity. In contrast to English number words, German number words between 20 and 100 are constructed by saying the second digit first (e.g. “twenty-one” = “einundzwanzig” = lit. “one-and-twenty”).

As far as the times tables are concerned, I’m pretty sure my daughter has now two different systems in her head – Einmaleins in German and times tables in English. I’ve timed her a couple of times responding to a set of simple multiplications in English and in German. In German, she’s consistently performing the same task a minute or two faster. The fact that she’s faster in German (learnt at home by rote) than in English (learnt at school by exploration) establishes the superiority of rote learning for this particular task (well, really, I always knew that …).

However, the more intriguing observation is that while she’s doing well doing arithmetic problems on paper, she’s lost her automaticity in reading numbers out loud, particularly when it comes to 3-digit numbers. 3-digit numbers in English are basically formed by reading the first digit first, the second second and the third third, i.e. 438 is “four-hundred-and-thirty-eight.” In German the order is digit 1, digit 3, digit 2, i.e. 438 is literally “four-hundred-eight-and-thirty.”

As a matter of fact, I’ve discovered that I’m suffering from the same affliction: I’ve lost the automaticity to read out numbers in German “without thinking” and when I hear numbers in German I have to visualize them or “translate” them into the English order in my head.

When I reflect on this experience, it’s easy to see why formerly popular opinion would have been so focused on the negative cognitive effects of bilingualism. In the first half of the 20th century academic and popular opinion agreed that bilingualism was a social ill and that, wherever possible, young minds should be shielded from the confusing exposure to more than one language. Nowadays, of course, the pendulum has swung wide in the other direction and academic and popular opinion agree that bilingualism is a wonderful thing and carries all manner of cognitive, academic, creative and social benefits.

I’ve always found this ideologisation of bilingualism irritating but hadn’t understood how it has stunted our ability as bilingualism researchers to actually formulate a productive research agenda on the interrelationship between bilingualism and mathematical learning, for instance, until I read Aneta Pavlenko’s new edited volume Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages. I will explain why the study of bilingualism and cognition is such a new field in my next blog post but in the meantime maybe someone wants to venture a guess?

Aneta Pavlenko (Ed.) (2011). Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages Multilingual Matters