Bilingualism - Test 5

C1 Advanced · Multiple Choice Reading · C1 Advanced Trainer 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about bilingualism. For questions 1–6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

In a café in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud laughter. They are discussing a friend, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because it sounds intriguing, especially to a nosy person like me. I can’t help but interrupt to ask what language they are speaking. They both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages. One of them speaks seven. Was it easy to learn so many languages? ‘Yes, it’s normal,’ he laughs. A week later, I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. It’s part of a seemingly simple experiment – though there’s a catch – run by Panos Athanasopoulos, a leading researcher of the bilingual mind. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. There’s nothing else to look at. All I have to do is decide which snowflake is being described. The descriptions, however, are in an invented language called Syntaflake, bearing no similarity to languages I know. The task is strange and incredibly difficult, and by the end, I have to admit defeat. I join Athanasopoulos and gloomily recount my struggle to learn the language, despite my best efforts. But it appears that was where I went wrong. ‘The people who perform best on this task are the ones who don’t care at all and just want to get it over with. Interested people like yourself try to find a pattern and they always don’t succeed,’ he says. ‘It’s impossible, in the time given, to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what’s being said to you. But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. That’s why if you don’t think about it, you’ll do OK. Children do the best.’ What lies behind Athanasopoulos’ invention of a new language for the snowflake test is a desire to look at the connections between language and culture. Part of his research is about teasing out the language from the culture it is threaded within. Ask me in English what my favourite food is and I will picture myself in London choosing from the options I enjoy there. But ask me in French and I transport myself to Paris, where the options I’ll choose from are different. So the same deeply personal question gets a different answer depending on the language in which you’re asking me. This idea that you gain a new personality with every language you speak is a profound one. The interest of Athanasopoulos and his colleagues in the capacity of language to change people’s world views builds on earlier research. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp, a linguist based at the University of California, asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language. She found that the women ended the sentences very differently, depending on which language was used. For example, ‘When my wishes conflict with my family ...’ was completed in Japanese as ‘it is a time of great unhappiness’; in English, as ‘I do what I want’. Ervin-Tripp concluded that humans thought place within language mindsets and that bilinguals have different mindsets for each language. It’s an extraordinary idea, but one that has been borne out in subsequent studies; and many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language. To assess the effect that trying to understand the Syntaflake language had on my brain, I took another test before and after the snowflake task. This test involved matching patterns of arrows and required great concentration. It’s not a task where practice improves performance; but when I did the same test again after the snowflake task, I was significantly better at it. The arrow task involved blocking out impulses and bending rules. The part of the brain that manages this is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Part of the brain’s ‘executive system’, the ACC enables the brain to concentrate on one task while blocking out competing information and to switch focus between different tasks. The snowflake test primed my ACC for the second arrow task, just as bilingual activity seems to train the executive system more generally. In fact, a steady stream of studies has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks and suggests that the executive systems of bilinguals are different from, and in some ways superior to, those of monolinguals.

envy about the skills they possess

irritation over the disturbance they are causing

frustration at her limited ability to understand them

embarrassment at the extent of her interest in them

What feeling does the writer express about the two construction workers she comes across in a café?

the artificiality of the situation

the difficulty of the audio task

the uniformity of the onscreen images

the poor level of her own performance

When the writer describes the ‘snowflake experiment’, what is the ‘catch’ referred to in line 9?

It required a degree of commitment that many people are unwilling to give.

The researcher was unsurprised by the writer’s lack of success in it.

It was designed with specific personality types in mind.

The writer misunderstood the point of it.

What point is made about the snowflake experiment in the third paragraph?

explaining her own views.

introducing a new subject.

illustrating a point made previously.

exploring the implications of a theory.

In the fifth paragraph, the writer is

are particularly convincing because of how distinct the two languages are.

are in line with the intuitions that lots of people have.

are based on a limited amount of evidence.

have been disputed by other researchers.

The writer says that Susan Ervin-Tripp’s research findings

They reflect the impact that speaking more than one language can have on the brain.

They highlight how switching from one language to another can cause difficulties.

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

More C1 Advanced Multiple Choice Reading practice · All C1 Advanced practice