When one foreign language repels another

Papagayo, Dust collector, today you can be proud: you have learned many words in Spanish! But now they don’t speak English… How do you say “parrot”? You only have the word Papagayo Mind… and Dust collector chased Dust collector From your memory… You may be familiar with this experience, researchers at the Brain Institute in the Netherlands have studied this and found that when you start a new foreign language, you have difficulty remembering the first words spoken.

To reach this conclusion, the researchers recruited 31 Dutch subjects for whom English was their first foreign language, but for whom they did not speak Spanish. First, they took a vocabulary test of naming the pictures using English words they knew. Then, they had to learn the Spanish translation of half of these words. Finally, they took the English vocabulary test again.

After learning the Spanish versions, participants took longer to find the English words. How to interpret these results? The researchers first hypothesized that they could be explained by a retrograde interference effect: new memories are initially formed in an area called the “hippocampus” and then transferred to the cortex for long-term memorization in a “consolidation process”. But this process can be affected by learning new information that tends to be stored in the same brain region. During this experience, learning Spanish can affect English skills in this way.

Yes but… In this experiment, the participants had known English words for so long that they were not in the process of assimilation and therefore theoretically could not be “removed”. How can we explain that after an hour of learning, they had so much trouble remembering the English versions of Spanish words? This is a mystery raised by this study, therefore indicating that this competition between languages ​​in our brain cannot be explained by the backward interference mechanism alone!