A small dose of alcohol really improves foreign language skills

    A group of Dutch, British and German psychopharmacologists published a scientific article clarifying some aspects of the effect of low-dose alcohol poisoning on higher nervous activity.

    Science has studied fairly well the negative effects of alcohol on the brain. Studies have shown that a toxic substance suppresses various aspects of cognitive functionality, including self-monitoring, working memory and the ability to switch between tasks (multitasking). All these abilities are essential for the effective perception, processing and reproduction of speech. From this we can conclude that a drunk person will have a worse understanding of speech and worse speaking. Phonetic fluency tests indirectly confirmed this.(the ability to generate words that begin with a specific letter).

    In the new work, scientists set the task to investigate how alcohol use affects the ability to speak a foreign language (subjectively and objectively) in people who speak several languages.

    As is known from previous scientific works ( Green and Eckhard, 1998 ), when studying and pronouncing words / sentences in a foreign language, lexical units of different languages ​​- native and foreign - are activated simultaneously and compete for choice. The skill of speaking in a foreign language partially depends on the mechanism of self-control (inhibitory control), which allows a person to choose the right element from this pair, as shown by the work of Kroll et al. (2008). Since it is known that alcohol affects the system of self-control, it is logical to assume that it will also affect the fluency in a foreign language.

    In theory, drinking alcohol should adversely affect this skill. Surprisingly, the opposite opinion is common among people who speak foreign languages. Many of them believe that when they drink a little, they begin to speak a foreign language better. The same opinion is confirmed by numerous discussions in the media and social networks, where hundreds of people confirm it. In addition to these anecdotal examples, there is one 1972 scientific study that really showed that a small dose of alcohol improves the pronunciation of sounds of a foreign language (Thai) in English-speaking people.

    Scientists have put forward two possible explanations for this common myth:

    1. Drinking alcohol really improves your knowledge of a foreign language.
    2. It seems to the drunk person that he begins to speak a foreign language better (several scientific papers show that alcohol helps to increase the assessment of most people’s mental abilities).

    An experiment was conducted to test both of these theories. The pharmacological effect of alcohol consumption was studied in a group of volunteers who were offered to drink alcohol or water (control group). As alcohol, we used one serving of Smirnoff Red (37.5% alcohol) with lemon dissolved in water, after which a person's blood alcohol concentration increased to about 0.04 ppm (depending on gender and weight). Water was chosen instead of a placebo - a drink that is similar to alcohol in taste but does not contain alcohol - because previous studies have shown a significant effect of placebo on people's cognitive abilities. It turned out that if it looks like alcohol, it acts on people almost the same way as real alcohol.

    To assess the possible effect of subjective increase in self-esteem among drunken volunteers, they were offered to solve problems that were completely unrelated to the main experience (arithmetic). Human self-esteem was measured before and after substance use.

    Initially, the researchers put forward a number of the most obvious hypotheses that they intended to verify during the experiment. They suggested that after drinking, people would report a subjective improvement in their foreign language skills (increased self-esteem), but objectively they would show worse results for that skill. It was assumed that an unreasonable increase in self-esteem will also be confirmed in the arithmetic test.

    The experiment was attended by 50 junior students at Maastricht University (Netherlands), whose mother tongue was German, but who also passed the entrance exams in Dutch.

    Actual results did not confirm the hypotheses put forward. Firstly, the subjective assessment of their abilities among drunk students has not changed (55.53 versus 53.59 on a 100-point scale, see table). Secondly, the assessment of linguistic skills by outsiders (objective assessment) turned out to be significantly higher for students who drank alcohol than for students who drank water (61.53 versus 56.65). The results are shown in the table.



    Scientists offer different explanations for this strange phenomenon. Perhaps a small dose of alcohol reduces the effect of anxiety, which prevents a person from speaking a foreign language: the drunk person is trite less nervous - and begins to speak better. But this is only a theory that requires additional research.

    The scientific article was published on October 18, 2017 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology (doi: 10.1177 / 0269881117735687).

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