Right/Left Brain and Language Acquisition?

[ginlindzey]

Ok, so I'm spending spring break reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.  I've always wanted to read this book, and it's really fascinating.  Much of it discusses research from the last 15 years ago regarding the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

And it's led me to wonder, is there research regarding language acquisition and the hemispheres of the brain?  I know that language is primarily  left side, but is language acquisition all on the left?  When you consider one side is more analytical and the other synthesizes....  well, I'm just wondering if that's part of the trick to letting go of feeling the need to look up every darn word and realizing that the WHOLE sentence is the key and each phrase as it comes, not each little word and each little ending.

They say the analytical processing that the left brain does is slower than a computer, but that the ability to synthesize whole information--like a face and all its details--is something that the right side does with great efficiency.  And I'm wondering whether this is part of the learning process--students try to be nothing but analytical, and we teach them to be highly analytical because of the inflectional nature of the language--when speed of reading as well as comprehension can be increased if we could develop, I dunno, a more wholistic approach to a passage.

I try to do this, I try to model the importance of reading the whole sentence if not paragraph, of seeing the bigger picture and using metaphrasing/placeholding for the missing info.  This has clearly been more of an intuitive thing with me, and something that I've been very passionate about, but now I'm wondering whether there is any hard data on this from a scientific point of view.

 

 

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine who is a recent psych PhD warns me that nearly all right/left-brain stuff out there has little to no basis in science and is wildly overblown. So, while there may well be stuff on that topic, it's probably written more from a popular-press side of things than a grounded-in-science side. (She, and my neuroscience PhD friend, are also of the impression that the state of our understanding of the brain is not nearly advanced enough to support serious conclusions about education.)

[ginlindzey.livejournal.com]

You know, that may be so. On the other hand, this book is quoting actual studies and providing details they do know. It also discusses what we don't know. We do know a lot from stroke victims as well as those suffering from epileptic seizures effecting both hemispheres who then undergo surgery to separate the hemispheres.

Look, here's a reply I posted on BestPractices a few minutes ago:

***

[this part was posted by another listmember, JP]

>>This question brings to mind a show or video I saw some time ago, in which a specialist on autism was showing people what it is like to process information as some autistic people do. Participants were asked to tell a simple story, with each person adding a sentence or two, but they could not use the letter S. All of a sudden, people were processing language with the analytical part of their brain, and everything slowed down to a crawl. Shows how inefficient one part of our brain is at doing what is natural and almost instantaneous for another part.

[my comments:]

Interesting.

My son has atypical aspergers compounded with speech delay. His language patterns sound like someone who has learned a 2nd language well enough to function and be understood, but not with the kind of fluency and grace that a person should have when you speak.

When he plays online games w/audio connections, other kids will accuse him of having an accent or simply being a retard--both of which hurt his feelings (emotionally he's like a 7 year old, even though he's 13).

He does well in math, esp things that are NOT word problems. He loves music, though like a typical teenager he's into a heavy rock phase (had broader tastes, including classical, a few years ago).

Between my experiences with him and my students who are not typical I-can-memorize-anything Latin students, I'm beginning to think there's something regarding the hemispheres of the brain worth exploring.

I posted my initial note on my blogsite, and got a reply that said that most scientists in the field find the info on left/right brain overblown and exagerated with what is truly known. That may be, but the book, _Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is quoting actual scientific studies not to mention has sidebars filled with interesting quotes and anecdotes.

Frankly, I can't wait for science to provide proof for something that seems right to me. Science cannot tell me why my son is the way he is, science cannot provide medication that will make him normal enough to blend in with the world, science cannot predict what he will make of himself in the world. So I need to wait for science to prove there's something more to right vs left brain?

There's something here... I truly feel it. And I bet I'm not the first. I just thought that this list, of all the lists I'm on, might have seen something in the literature that's out there in Rassias or Krashen or whatever.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I'm a skeptic at heart when it comes to science, and very much so when it comes to reporting of science. There's a lot of science that gets quoted in the media but is taken totally out of context, reported without statistics or qualifiers that were important to the meaning, etc. Sometimes it gets reported as if it says more than it does, or people will make claims that are even the opposite of what the science supports. So unless I really trust the writer's background in science and statistics, I don't put much stock in quotes of studies I haven't read. And my instincts about the philosophy of science -- what it is, what it means, what it's for -- make me really uncomfortable about the idea of science being used to provide proof for something that seems right. That's not what science is for, or how good science is done.

So yeah, I'd have to see the original studies, or at least the scientific background of the writer. (The epilepsy studies are something I've discussed with my psych PhD friend, actually; yes, pretty dramatic things happen when you cut the corpus callosum in adult brains, but there's only so far you can extrapolate that. You get different results with young brains, which are better able to route around trauma. Brain functions aren't usually as localized as they're made out to be even in healthy brains, and in traumatized young brains, capacities can develop even if areas typically used for them are removed. There's still a ton we don't know.)

[ginlindzey.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you say, and the book does mention that as for localities of certain things that they are only right X percent of the time for X percent of the population. There clearly is nothing exact about the brain, nor how it heals itself.

It's all interesting.

And while there is no exact science with application of what limited info they do have, it is worth including in the corpus of understanding how we learn and thus how we teach. We have, of course, learned that by teaching in a variety of ways to make what we're teaching available and attainable to special ed kids, that "normal" kids have benefitted. We know that newer ways of approaching Latin, besides the old memorize all the morphological endings and then put them together logically and analyze each word in each sentence in order to reach meaning. That way is slow. Oh, what you know is precise, but it's slow.

Making sure you know the exact meaning of every single word, esp of a new author, is slow, incredibly slow, but also traditional. And traditionally, Latin undergraduates are frustrated with their progress as opposed to their modern language peers, who are reading whole novels and having fluent conversations. We are never "trained" to get beyond the parse and decode level.

And that's not reading Latin.

Even as I'm typing this, I am thinking more about the whole message, about what I'm saying and thinking. I am not thinking about what my fingers are doing and why they are able to fly almost as fast as I can think across this keyboard to type what I am thinking. I am just grateful that they can.

I am not having to think of each key as I type. I am not having to spell out words or even think of how to spell the words. The words are just appearing in front of me. HOW do I do that?

I hate texting from my phone because it is so painfully slow, where I have to think not only of every single letter, but whether it's the 2nd or 3rd letter on a particular key.

And what does this have to do with Latin? I think somehow there is a connection. I know what when I apply my own metaphrasing techniques that I am able to read a Latin sentence more quickly (that is, if I need to apply it at all) because it frees up the logical thinking side of me that needs that slot filled and allows me to continue making meaning out of the whole without a need to know every damn word. And I feel that the reason why metaphrasing works has to do with this dynamic between the verbal, logical side of my brain, and the brain that wants the bigger picture, that wants to synthesize the whole, as naturally as I can reading English.

And I'm trying to shape this whole picture because I feel all the pieces coming together--almost--in my head on why I teach the way I teach is truly a good way to teach. Oh, there are things I do that aren't good and I have little plans hatching on how to do things better next year. But right now... the big picture... from Caecilius to Aeneas... it's coming into focus and I'm beginning to understand WHY.