6

Cognition from Top to Bottom

Hearing Is Also Seeing

In developing strategies to learn a foreign language effectively, it’s important to be aware of research that shows that some of our intuitions about listening and speaking are simply incorrect. For example, when we listen to someone speak, the subjective impression is that our ears do all the work, and that our eyes play little or no role in the process of comprehension. Of course, even though those of us with hearing impairments can achieve impressive levels of understanding through lip reading, most people think of that as a special skill that has no relevance to how those with normal hearing make sense of speech. But in fact, we are all lip readers to some degree. Not convinced? Perhaps some examples can help.

A powerful demonstration of how hearing is also seeing can be demonstrated with something called the McGurk effect, named after (who else?) Harry McGurk, who published a paper on this phenomenon with John MacDonald (and like many important discoveries, it was stumbled upon by accident).¹ We’re going to describe it to you, but we also urge you to look online for one of the many videos that demonstrate this effect. You can try it out first, or read about it and then view a demonstration. Incredibly, this is a perceptual effect where knowledge of what’s going on doesn’t alter your ability to experience a powerful illusion. Roger has shown this video to his perception class over several years, and is still amazed at how repeated demonstrations haven’t altered his experience of the effect. There are several examples on the Web, but we’ll describe the one that shows a long-haired, bearded man wearing rectangular granny glasses. You’ll know it when you see it.

The video itself isn’t much to look at. You’ll see a closely cropped shot of the man’s face as he repeats one syllable six times. There’s a pause, and then the video loops back to the beginning. If you stare directly at the man’s mouth, you’ll hear him saying “da da, da da, da da.” Watch the video closely for several moments to convince yourself that these are the sounds the speaker is producing. Now all you need to do is close your eyes and continue listening to the video. You should now hear something different—it sounds like the man has switched to saying “ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.” But how is that possible? It’s exactly the same video. In fact, if you open and close your eyes, you’ll hear the sounds change depending on whether you’re watching and listening, or just listening.

As you may have begun to suspect, there’s a mismatch between the speaker’s lip movements and his voice on the soundtrack. The man’s voice really is saying “ba ba,” but what you’re seeing are the lip movements for “ga ga.” This mismatch can’t be detected when your eyes are closed, so you’re able to hear the sounds accurately. But when you both hear and watch the video, the perceptual system detects a mismatch, and does its best to reconcile the difference between what is being seen and what is being heard. Your brain tells you that you’re hearing “da da” because it’s the best perceptual solution for the mismatched perceptual inputs.

By showing how vision and hearing can be tricked, the McGurk effect illustrates how the eyes and ears normally work together to create a more complete perceptual experience, even when we think we are just listening or just seeing. Because adult language learners benefit from having the fullest range of linguistic inputs possible, it is important to couple vision with listening during language learning whenever possible. Purely auditory learning materials by themselves provide a less rich, and therefore more challenging, learning environment.

For example, when we speak on the telephone, a great deal of the acoustic energy that differentiates one sound from another is simply thrown away, largely owing to bandwidth limitations. Early telephone engineers were relieved to discover that, even though the speech signal was altered, it was still intelligible. This is analogous to ripping a track from a compact disk with your computer to create a smaller MP3 file. It’s possible to throw away the majority of the information encoded on the disk and still have a copy that sounds like your favorite song. That’s because the disk’s track contains extremely high and low frequencies that most people can’t hear anyway.

What price do we pay for all of this compression? Not much, most of the time. Sure, your daughter’s voice sounds a bit tinny and unnatural as it comes through the tiny speaker of a mobile phone, but you can still understand her without too much difficulty. But you may also recall other occasions when there were problems. If you’ve ever tried to spell something during a phone call, it’s quite possible that the person at the other end wasn’t able to completely understand what you were saying. The high-frequency information that the phone company threw away is the culprit. Sounds like /f/ and /s/ are rarely confused in face-to-face speech, because you can hear the high-frequency sounds that differentiate them. But, as we’ve explained, those sounds are being clipped severely in the transmission process, and the truly awful microphones and speakers in many cell phones don’t help either.

So if you’re sharing the news over the phone that your college-bound son was accepted by FSU (go Seminoles!), you may be met with confusion until you say something like “You know, F as in Frank, S as in Sam.” There’s a good reason why aviators and the military use phonetic alphabets (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and so on). Admittedly, most of us aren’t trying to land a plane on the correct runway or giving orders over the din of battle, but the principle is the same.

You probably haven’t thought too much about this because when you are speaking on the telephone in your native language and you experience difficulties, your prior knowledge of the language allows you to fill in any sounds that may be distorted or missing. Speaking on the telephone in your target language, however, means that you must rely more heavily on the sounds of the language only, since you may lack the contextual cues and background information that top-down processing would normally provide. Therefore, missing or distorted sounds or extraneous noise can easily derail your understanding in a language you don’t know well.

You can experience another way that vision supplements hearing by watching television with the sound turned off. Tonight when you’re viewing a favorite program, try watching it without any sound for a few minutes, say between sets of commercials. (If your family members object, tell them you’re doing it for science.) Before you try it, estimate how well you think you’ll do. Most people respond to this question with very low estimates, and the claim is almost always the same: “I don’t know how to read lips.” If you’re like many, however, you might be pleasantly surprised by how much you are able to understand. Granted, you will probably miss a great deal, but that’s partly because of how most television programs are recorded. You’re typically seeing individuals in profile as they talk to each other, so you’re only seeing part of their faces. It’s quite likely, however, that even with this impediment, you will be able to make out many simple one-word utterances, like “Why?” or “No!”

It’s been said that you can claim to be a fluent speaker of a foreign language when you can understand a joke told in that tongue or understand someone over the phone. Understanding jokes requires cultural and pragmatic knowledge, but now you understand why telephone conversations, radio programs, and audiotapes can present such a challenge. Being aware of how hearing and seeing work together can help improve your language-learning strategies. For example, when you’re having a conversation in your second language, look directly at your partner’s face so that you can see her articulate the sounds that make up each word. Also, choose study materials that allow you to see people speaking directly in addition to hearing their voices. It’s not always possible, and the effect may be subtle in some cases, but it will have a significant effect on improving your comprehension.

Untranslatable

One of the great joys of learning another language is encountering new concepts. People take great delight in discovering a concept in one language that is seemingly untranslatable into another. This is especially true when it comes to emotion words. The artist Pei-Ying Lin mapped the relationship between some of these culturally specific emotions in an innovative project called Unspeakableness. One untranslatable concept represented in the Unspeakableness project is the Welsh word hiraeth, which Lin defined as “Homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed and the earnest desire for the Wales of the past.”²

Based on words like hiraeth, linguists, philosophers, and others have wondered to what extent language influences thought. In other words, does the language one speaks determine how one thinks? There is no simple answer to this question. Fortunately, however, the majority of concepts needed to function successfully in a foreign language overlap with concepts used in the native language, to some degree. There is no reason to learn these concepts as if they were completely new categories. Adults already have very well-developed sets of concepts and categories that they express through their native language. Therefore, it makes sense to treat concepts from the native language as prototypes for the concepts of the new language, with the understanding that differences between the boundaries of the two sets of concepts will be refined over time through exposure.³

Put a different way, because words like hiraeth make up a minority of the many words one must learn in order to speak another language, whether growing up in Wales is the only way you can truly understand hiraeth is more of a theoretical, rather than a practical, consideration. To start learning Welsh, all you really need to know is that when someone talks about hiraeth, you know in general what it means to them.

This is not to say that the impact of language on thought is unimportant or has no real-world implications. For example, how individuals solve problems may be influenced by whether they are thinking in their native language or a foreign language. It appears that speaking in a nonnative language can provide a sense of distance from a problem that leads individuals to make moral decisions less emotionally. Other studies have also found that using one’s native language to remember autobiographical events arouses more intense emotions than does remembering in a nonnative language. So be glad that there is not a perfect mapping between your native and target languages. The similarities are close enough to get you started, and once you’re on your way, you’ll enjoy the differences so much you’ll never want to stop.⁴

False Friends and Kissing Cousins

An overarching theme of this book is that the adult foreign language learner can capitalize on what he already knows to assist in the learning of a new language. When it comes to vocabulary, this turns out to be true as well. If the only language you speak is English, you might be surprised to learn that you already know dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of words in several other languages. This happy fact is the result of the unusual history of English. At its heart, it’s a Germanic language, originally brought to the British Isles by invaders from what is now northern Germany and Denmark in the fifth century AD. Over time, this language, called Anglo-Saxon, became Old English, Middle English, and finally Modern English. Therefore, many of the basic terms in English are similar to words in modern German and the Scandinavian languages (which are also Germanic in origin). First-time students of German may be thrown by the idea of three genders for nouns or formidably multisyllabic words, but they will also encounter many old friends—Mann, Vater, Sommer, and Garten are all close enough to be recognized immediately as man, father, summer, and garden, to pick just a few of many possible examples.

This doesn’t mean, however, that all similarities are helpful. Nestled among the words that seem so familiar to the native English speaker are a few that are actually quite different in meaning. They are often referred to as false friends (or more formally, false cognates). These exceptions can’t be anticipated or predicted—they must simply be learned as exceptions to the general rule that similar-looking words are similar in meaning.

A German speaker who uses the term bald, for example, isn’t referring to someone who’s hairless, but is instead saying “soon.” To the puzzlement of many a tourist, the Menü in a German restaurant isn’t a list of all the dishes that the establishment prepares, but rather the day’s special (Speisekarte is the equivalent term for “menu”). A Puff isn’t a burst of air—it’s a bordello. And perhaps the most famous German false friend is Gift, which certainly sounds like it refers to something pleasant to a speaker of English. In fact, it’s the word for poison. Fortunately, the ratio of false friends to genuine similarities is quite low, but these exceptions are words to watch out for.

For many European languages other than those with German roots, it’s still the case that your English vocabulary can be of considerable help. And once again, the reason has to do with the unusual history of English. What we now call England was ruled for half a millennium by the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon invaders, until they too were displaced by invaders from abroad. In 1066, William the Conqueror brought his army and his language to the British Isles. The invaders crossed the channel from Normandy, and Norman was a dialect of Old French. For several generations, the language of the ruling class was essentially a form of French, and what is now called Anglo-Norman was used for administrative purposes. The rest of the population continued to speak English (by this point, what we now call Middle English), but many Anglo-Norman terms found their way into the language of the commoners.

Traces of this essentially bilingual state of affairs can still be seen today in the unchanging terms used in legal documents. Expressions like last will and testament, cease and desist, and aid and abet are actually expressing the same idea in both languages. These so-called legal doublets are just one of the many ways in which the Norman invasion profoundly altered English. The advantage for today’s speaker of English is the head start that it provides for learning vocabulary in many languages, and not just French.

To understand why this is so, a brief historical digression is necessary once again. Modern French has similarities with other tongues like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian because they are all descended from Latin. Collectively, they’re referred to as the Romance languages, not because they are necessary the languages of love, but because of their common origin in the language of the ancient Romans. Even Romanian, spoken in Eastern Europe and far from Rome, Paris, or Madrid, was once part of this empire, and is also a member of the Latinate family.

This means that many Romance terms entered English through Anglo-Norman, as new words replacing Germanic terms, or in many cases, taking up residence alongside them. As a result, modern English has many pairs of terms that are essentially synonymous—think of moon (Germanic) and lunar (Romance), and the legal doublets described earlier. These synonymous terms make the vocabulary of modern English unusually rich, and they also give the English-speaking student of modern Romance languages a considerable advantage.

And in fact, the news gets even better. Romance terms entered English through two other avenues as well. Latin was the liturgical language used in English churches until the separation with Roman Catholicism under the reign of Henry VIII in 1538. In addition, many technical, scientific, or medical terms were coined during the early modern era by drawing upon Latin (and, to some degree, Greek) roots. Latin was universally known by the educated class in England, so entrepreneurs, scientists, and physicians naturally turned to these word stocks to create new terms.

That’s enough history for now—let’s get back to the dividends that all of this will pay in learning vocabulary in other European languages. As an example, consider the word hand. We can readily identify it as Germanic, because this word is the same in modern German—Hand. And if you’re trying to learn another Germanic language, the similarities carry through to those tongues as well: hand (Dutch and Swedish) and hånd (Danish and Norwegian). So you’ve always known this word in Swedish—you just didn’t know that you knew it!

If we turn to the Romance languages, we can begin with the Latin word for hand, which is manus. This seems quite different, but it should remind you of English terms you already know—manual as in manual labor, or manipulate. And hand in the modern descendants of Latin is also recognizably descended from manus: main (French), mano (Spanish), mano (Italian), and mão (Portuguese). The terms aren’t identical, but they have a family resemblance, and if you’re on the lookout for such similarities, these cognates, as they’re called, can be extremely helpful.

Even in cases in which a word doesn’t derive directly from Latin, there can be a link if you know to look for it. In some cases, the common link is from the Greek, as in the word for heart, which is kardia. There are many English words and phrases that use this Greek root, such as cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary, and cardiac arrest. The Latin term is cor, which is fairly similar, and once again appears recognizably in French (cœur), Spanish (corazón), and Italian (cuore). More kissing cousins than brothers and sisters, perhaps, but the resemblance is still there.

Not only is this metalinguistic awareness helpful for many languages in Europe, but languages spoken in other parts of the world often have their own historical connections you can exploit. For example, many words in a variety of Asian languages, such as Korean, Japanese, and Thai, have roots in Chinese. Likewise, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Czech, among others, are part of the same Slavic family. Connections among language families might not be helpful if you are studying one of these languages for the first time, but they will come in handy if you decide to move from Moscow to Prague. As mentioned earlier, there may be exceptions (so beware of false friends!), but an awareness of linguistic kinship will serve you well.

Words, Words, Words

When most people think about learning a foreign language, they spend a great deal of time trying to tame the language’s vocabulary. And although it’s just one of many aspects of competency, it is undeniably essential—after all, one has to know the language’s words in order to communicate. So let’s take a look at perceptions and misperceptions of acquiring a new language’s vocabulary.

One pervasive belief about foreign language learning is that you will have to master the pronunciation, meaning, and in some cases, the grammatical gender of thousands of words in order to achieve proficiency. This is such a daunting prospect that it probably scares away many would-be language learners. But it may not be as bad as you think. First of all, just how many words do you really need to learn?

If your native language is English, then you know that its vocabulary is immense: estimates range from a half million to a million words. Of course, this number is inflated by all sorts of factors: obsolete words, technical terms, and names for things rarely encountered (such as exotic plants and animals). All of these certainly fatten up the unabridged dictionaries of the language. It’s also the case that, because of English’s complex history, as described earlier, there is often more than one word that refers to the same thing. For example, both kingly and regal refer to the same concept, but you don’t have to know both words to express the idea “fit for a monarch.”

So if we factor out the obscure and the duplicated, we’re left with a much smaller number of words than a half million. In fact, it’s estimated that a native, college-educated speaker of English is unlikely to know more than a fraction of these—perhaps only about 17,000 words.⁵

How do you measure up against this number? You might think that the best way to determine to determine the size of your vocabulary would be to see how many words you know in a dictionary. However, this method would depend on the size of the dictionary. If you have a couple of dictionaries lying around your house, you can try the following experiment. Open the smaller dictionary at random, and point to one of the words defined on that page. Read it and see if it’s a word you know. Now repeat this exercise nine more times. Multiply the percentage of words you recognized by the number of words defined by that dictionary (it’s usually listed prominently on the cover). Now repeat the process with the larger dictionary. Do the two estimates of your vocabulary size converge? They’re likely to differ substantially from each other. Although you probably recognized all the words you pointed to in the small paperback dictionary, you then multiplied the percentage by the relatively small number of words defined by that book. With the larger dictionary, recognizing even just a few of the words leads to a much higher score, since you’re multiplying by a much larger number of defined words. So this method tells us more about the size of one’s dictionary than the size of one’s vocabulary. In reality, it’s virtually impossible to accurately count the number of words in someone’s vocabulary.

But if we can’t measure the size of one’s vocabulary that way, perhaps we can by answering a related question: What does it mean to “know” a word? The estimates of vocabulary size provided by researchers typically refer to a speaker’s receptive vocabulary. These are the words that a speaker knows the meaning of, but might never actually speak or write. For example, when was the last time you used the word microorganism? You undoubtedly were exposed to this term repeatedly in high school biology, but unless this led you to a career in microbiology, you have rarely or never used the word since. So it’s more accurate to say that a college-educated speaker of English has a receptive vocabulary of about 17,000 words, but uses far, far fewer than that on a daily basis.

And how about all of a word’s variant forms? Should we count those? If you know the meaning of help, do you automatically get credit for knowing helps, helped, helping, helper, helpful, helpless, helplessly, unhelpful, and unhelpfully? Should this count as one word, or as ten (or more)? Linguists deal with this issue by designating one word as the lemma, or citation form (in this case, help). The other terms are considered to be variations of a single underlying lexeme. It is assumed that if you know the lemma, you also know (or can figure out) these variations.

And then there is the existence of what researchers call frontier words. These are words that you only partially know the meaning of. For example, you might know that truculent or supercilious are bad things to be called, but if someone asked you to provide their dictionary definitions, you might find yourself at a loss. Not surprisingly, therefore, the existence of frontier words greatly affects estimates of the size of one’s vocabulary. If someone has a dim sense of the meaning of a word, does he know it or doesn’t he? Clearly, the answer is not black and white.

Another reason why it’s so hard to estimate the size of someone’s vocabulary is that all of us speak in our own special way, which is called an idiolect. An idiolect is a native speaker’s unique, idiosyncratic way of using the language. This is different from a person’s dialect, which reflects the common linguistic features of a group of people. We all speak an idiolect and it includes not only vocabulary and grammar, but also particular turns of phrase. Idiolects are so specific that forensic linguists have compared a person’s idiolect to a specific text in order to determine if the same person could, in fact, have produced it. This technique has been used to identify the Unabomber, the authors of the Federalist Papers, and the author of the book Primary Colors.⁶

If native speakers have a receptive vocabulary of about 17,000 lemmas in their idiolect, does this mean everyone studying a foreign language will need to acquire a similar number in order to speak a second language? Seventeen thousand sounds a lot better than a half million, but it’s still a very large number. As it turns out, you can probably get by with less than a tenth of that. We know this because there have been several attempts to create a stripped-down version of English that can be learned more easily by speakers of other languages. In 1930, the linguist Charles Ogden proposed a vocabulary subset that he called Basic English. He suggested that a core vocabulary of around 1,200 words would be sufficient for communication for many purposes.⁷ The fruits of such an approach can be seen in the Simple English Wikipedia, which (as of this writing) contains over 115,000 entries, many of which use only the words from Ogden’s list. In the late 1950s, the Voice of America began to broadcast programs using Special English, which has a core vocabulary of around 1,500 words. So it is possible to communicate meaningfully with a relatively restricted number of words.

But is learning a language simply a matter of learning a certain number of words? We would argue, in fact, that the learning of words should not be seen as a primary goal in your attempt to acquire a second language. For one thing, most languages, including English, contain a large number of idiomatic expressions. For many such phrases, there is only an arbitrary relationship between the literal meaning of the words and what they refer to. We commonly use expressions like kick the bucket or let the cat out of the bag even though knowing what a bucket or a bag is has nothing to do with dying or revealing secrets. If your knowledge of a second language consisted only of what individual words mean, you would often miss the forest for the trees.

So while it’s important to learn vocabulary, you will probably do just fine if you learn several hundred terms. If your primary goal is to communicate with others, it may be more helpful to concentrate on learning how to combine the terms you do know to make expressions that speakers of the language commonly employ. You’ll be able to infer the meaning of many new words from context, and over time, you can develop an impressively large receptive vocabulary in your target language.

Learning to Swim by Swimming

In an episode of the US television program The Big Bang Theory, the brilliant but eccentric physicist Sheldon Cooper is arguing with his long-suffering roommate, Leonard Hofstadter. To make a point, Leonard asks Sheldon to remember the time he tried to learn how to swim by using the Internet. Offended, Sheldon replies, “I did learn how to swim.” Leonard points out that he had learned to swim on the floor. Sheldon replies by claiming that “The skills are transferable—I just have no interest in going in the water!”

This interaction is humorous because everyone knows how impractical and ineffective it would be to learn how to swim in this way. And yet many people learn a foreign language by doing something quite similar. If your goal is to converse with native speakers of your target language abroad, then learning vocabulary by listening to prerecorded lessons, flipping through flashcards, or practicing drills on the Internet is akin to swimming by moving your arms and legs on the floor. You might not drown, but you almost certainly will not give Michael Phelps any sleepless nights.

Just like for Sheldon, one of the biggest challenges for the second language learner is how to transfer artificially constructed language practice to the real world of language usage. In other words, how can we turn what we know into what we do?

Fortunately, cognitive scientists take an interest in the concept of knowledge transfer. Sometimes the transfer of what we have learned in one domain helps in acquiring new information. Noticing similarities in cognates is a kind of positive transfer if the two words in fact share a meaning. Sometimes, however, the transfer of learning can be negative if it interferes with acquiring new material, such as erroneously using the word order from your native language in your target language.⁸ Clearly, then, the goal in language learning is to maximize positive transfer and minimize negative transfer.

There are two mechanisms that adult language learners can use in order to facilitate positive transfer. First, low-road transfer is reflexive and happens when well-rehearsed material from one context is applied to a new context. For example, if you’ve been driving a car for a long period of time, and now want to drive a rental truck, low-road transfer is all that is needed. This is the typical transfer strategy of many foreign language learners: repetition, repetition, repetition. Low-road transfer can happen automatically, but only with plenty of practice in a variety of settings. It is useful for scripted activities, such as greetings, politeness rituals, and goodbyes. Low-road transfer, therefore, emphasizes outcome over process.⁹

However, a potentially more powerful type of knowledge transfer is high-road transfer, which is mindful and relies on metacognitive ability to consider consciously how new material applies to both previously learned knowledge and future situations. High-road transfer requires actively looking for patterns and connections in the material, which will take time and effort. It’s not as simple as merely rehearsing a phrase in a variety of settings. But the payoff is much greater because using high-road transfer will allow for flexibility in the use of the language. High-road transfer, therefore, emphasizes process over outcome. Consider the following example:

Richard and Roger once took a trip to Berlin, and as they prepared to leave their hotel room, there was a knock on the door. Roger, whose German at that time could be charitably described as rusty, opened the door and encountered a housekeeper, who asked him a rapid-fire question. He frantically tried to make sense of what had just been asked of him. Fortunately, Richard, whose command of the language was a little better, overheard the question and provided an appropriate response. As the housekeeper headed down the hallway, Roger finally understood the question. He was grateful for Richard’s intervention, but felt quite foolish. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the housekeeper was probably used to dealing with tongue-tied foreigners.

How can Roger transfer what he learned in this situation to future interactions with housekeepers? If he tried to create low-road transfer, he could easily memorize what Richard said and repeat it over and over in many different situations so that the next time a housekeeper knocked on the door, he would be ready with the answer. The problem with this strategy is that Roger is likely to encounter some negative transfer along with any potential positive transfer, because it is unlikely that every housekeeper he encounters will ask him the same question.

Or Roger could recognize that low-road transfer won’t help much in this case, chalk it up to experience, and not let it keep him from actively seeking opportunities to use his German on the rest of the trip, keeping in mind that learning German is a process, not an outcome.

But here’s Roger again a few years later at a family reunion in Germany. This was a large gathering of distant relatives, and they were delighted that one of their American cousins was able to attend. The German typically taught in the United States is called High German (Hochdeutsch), which is the standard dialect. Therefore, Roger had studied only High German in high school and college. The family reunion, however, took place in a small city near the Dutch border. In that area, Plattdeutsch, or “Low” German is the native dialect, although everyone is also familiar with the standard dialect.

At first, Roger was encouraged by his successful efforts to make small talk with family members at the breakfast table. In hindsight, however, these interactions were a sham: his hosts took pains to speak the standard dialect slowly and to use basic vocabulary. When these relatives were catching up with each other at the reunion, however, they were off to the races. They would occasionally interrupt their steady stream of excited chatter with guilty looks in Roger’s direction, and would remind each other with the phrase Immer Hoch! to use the standard dialect. However, they would soon forget and lapse into Low German. Unfortunately, Roger didn’t realize that when his relatives used the local dialect it was an excellent opportunity for him to take advantage of high-road transfer. He missed the chance to look for similarities between the German he had studied and the German he was hearing. As his relatives switched back and forth between German dialects, the differences he perceived in vowel pronunciation, word choice, and other linguistic features could have been applied to his future German studies. And, at a pragmatic level, Roger missed out on the opportunity to engage his family in a conversation about German dialects that he would have found both fascinating and instructive.

Of course, low-road and high-road transfer will both be useful in foreign language learning. However, since most foreign language students are already familiar with low-road transfer, actively creating opportunities for mindful, high-road transfer between one’s native language and the target language will be time well spent. The main point about transfer, however, is not to be like Sheldon—afraid to get in the water. Dive in—even if you have to wear water wings.

Metaphors and Idioms: A Free Ride or a Sticky Wicket?

Acquiring a second language presents us with many seemingly daunting challenges. We have to learn a different grammatical system. We have to master or at least approximate sounds that do not exist in our native tongue. We have to absorb the vocabulary of the foreign language, or at least several hundred words of it. Everything seems different. But in fact, one major aspect remains the same, and this is the conceptual structure that all languages share. We may need to learn that dog is el perro in Spanish, or kutya in Hungarian, or inu in Japanese, but the concept of “dog” remains unchanged. From a Mexican Chihuahua to a Hungarian Vizsla to a Japanese Akita, the collection of entities that this term includes (and does not include) is the same as in your native language. At its heart, a language is a shorthand for describing one’s experiences, and since humans physically perceive the world in roughly the same way, most concepts are roughly equivalent. The ways in which this shorthand is expressed will vary widely, but a universal conceptual grounding abides.

You can leverage this conceptual core in many ways as you study a new language. It can, for example, help you make sense of metaphorical relationships. A metaphor, in case you’re rusty with rhetorical terms, is simply a comparison between two things. The road was a snake as it wound through the mountains would be an example. The term metaphor is used when the comparison is implicit, as in the previous sentence, while simile refers to an explicit comparison, as in The road was like a snake.

A great deal of language, it turns out, is metaphorical. Sometimes this is obvious, as in the snake example, but often it is not. Cognitive scientists talk about metaphors as existing on a continuum of novelty, and at one end, many such expressions have become “frozen” in a given language. In English, we routinely refer to the face and hands of a clock, or the arms and legs of a chair, without even realizing that we are using the parts of the human body to describe the parts of other objects. And even more importantly for our purposes here, these metaphors tend not to exist in a vacuum.

The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson argued for the existence of entire metaphorical conceptual systems in their classic work Metaphors We Live By. They proposed that many linguistic expressions are based on particular conceptual metaphors, such as “Time is money” (He spent the hour in the library profitably), or “High status is up” (She’s climbing the ladder of success). One of the richest examples of this argument is the conceptual metaphor “Love is a journey.” There are dozens of familiar expressions that are unified by this conceptual core, and they run the gamut of emotions we experience in a close relationship. Consider the following:

Look how far we’ve come.

We’ve gotten off track.

We’ll just have to go our separate ways.

We can’t turn back now.

We’re at a crossroads.¹⁰

Seen in this light, it becomes clear that linguistic expressions may not be as arbitrary as they first appear. And this insight should provide you with some optimism about acquiring these seemingly disparate phrases in your new language.

Since we’ve been looking at metaphors concerning love, let’s continue in this vein and consider some cross-linguistic examples. Many languages conceptually map emotions onto parts of the body, as in to break someone’s heart. It would be discouraging indeed if this idea were expressed totally differently in different languages. Imagine if Germans referred to this as slapping someone’s forehead, while Russians made reference to punching someone’s shoulder. Fortunately, across a variety of languages, the phrase is the same or recognizably similar. Germans speak of jemandem das Herz brechen, and the Russian expression maps equivalently as well. There are minor variations: Greeks would say that one “tears the heart,” while speakers of Japanese would refer to this as “a thorn in the heart.” In Spanish, there is still the act of breaking, but it’s the soul instead of the heart.¹¹ Clearly, there is enough similarity here to be able to figure out such expressions when they are encountered.

Does this mean that we’re home free? Unfortunately, there is another side to this issue of linguistic mappings, and it has to do with idiomatic expressions. Whereas metaphors wear their hearts on their sleeves (if you’ll pardon the expression), the mappings for idioms are often more opaque. A good example of this in English would be the euphemisms we use to talk about death. We might refer to someone as pushing up daisies or having bought the farm, but now the correspondence seems to be arbitrary. Nothing about daisies or farms seems to connect to death in a straightforward way, and so legions of students learning English have simply been instructed to learn such expressions by rote. They are what they are.

This notion, however, has been challenged by the cognitive scientist Ray Gibbs. He has pointed out that even relatively opaque idiomatic expressions may have a broader conceptual basis. Consider, for example, the ways in which we talk about someone becoming extremely angry:

Blow your stack.

Flip your lid.

Hit the ceiling.

His pent-up anger welled up inside him.

The common element in these idioms is a conceptual mapping of anger as heated fluid within a container.¹²

Obviously, not every such mapping works: it would sound odd, at least in English, to say that a deceased person is pushing up petunias or has purchased the plantation. This nonproductivity, as researchers refer to it, is why certain expressions are labeled as metaphoric, whereas others are idiomatic. A road can be like a snake, or like spaghetti, or like anything else that can be bent or twisted. Idioms are said to be frozen either because the conceptual mapping has been lost over time or never existed in the first place.

The important point is to recommend that you take a step back and think about the conceptual mappings of metaphors and idioms in your target language, which can help you to organize and remember those that you’re learning.¹³ There will be many cases in which these mappings won’t work, but if you are alert to the possibilities of conceptual mappings, you can once again take advantage of what your native language has provided you for free. In addition, by learning the new conceptual mappings of your target culture, you will be able to use the language far more eloquently.