Drinking A Little Alcohol Can Improve Language Proficiency
It has long been part of popular culture Consumption of alcoholic beverages can help us master languages better which are not our mother tongue. In fact, there are cases in which this belief has reached the extreme, and proof of this is that on Facebook there is a page with more than 100,000 followers called “Being drunk increases my ability to speak other languages.”
It is already known that many of those beliefs that pass from mouth to ear are more myth than reality, and specifically, the idea that getting intoxicated with spirits can make us speak better languages is more of a joke than truth (in that state it is difficult for us to even pronounce some surnames, let alone use grammatical rules with which we are not very familiar).
However… what happens when alcohol consumption is moderate? Could this have a positive impact on our mastery of languages that we do not speak at a native level ? A recent study suggests that the answer is yes.
That alcohol has negative effects on the brain has been known for some time. The amount of money generated by the industry that sells these types of products has not overlooked the way in which these substances harm us in multiple ways, although certain alcohol products are better advertised than others.
For example, the brains of people with a history of alcoholism tend to be somewhat less large and the neuronal interconnections of some of its areas are less numerous than in healthy brains; This is noticeable, among other things, in their ability to use memory, since they have a damaged hippocampus, and in their management of emotions and impulses in real time.
However, beyond the direct effects that alcohol ingested in high quantities has on the nervous system, it is not unreasonable that in moderate quantities there are certain advantages related to this type of product. Specifically, a team of scientists from Maastricht University led by Fritz Renner set out to test whether drinking a little alcohol temporarily improves the way a recently learned language is spoken (in adults, of course).
This research, rather than discovering an advantage associated with alcohol consumption, serves to better understand the mechanisms involved in the use of a foreign language.
The effect of alcohol when speaking foreign languages
To carry out this research, Renner and his colleagues used an experimental study with 50 volunteers whose native language is German. These people were German students who were in their second year of their Psychology degree at the University of Maastrich, a city where many people from the German country go given its proximity to the border that separates both territories.
Furthermore, in order to transfer from Germany to Maastricht University, You have to stop first for a Dutch level test so practically all of these students had a level of this language that allowed them to speak it.
To begin the experimental conditions, the volunteers were divided into two groups: one of them drank 250 ml. of sparkling water, and the other drank the same amount of lemonade with a little vodka enough to reach a blood alcohol concentration of 0.04% (the amount of ml of alcohol that each person drank depended on their sex and body mass so that everyone had that 0.04%).
A quarter of an hour after having consumed the drinks, in a phase of the experiment in which the alcohol should have already passed into the blood and brain, the volunteers were asked to discuss the animal experimentation in Dutch for a couple of hours. of minutes. From this exercise, two native Dutch speakers had to rate the degree to which the Germans expressed themselves well or poorly, offering scores on different parameters: fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, word choice, clarity and overall quality of speech. Furthermore, the Germans had to rate themselves on how well or poorly they had spoken Dutch.
The surprising result
What Renner and his colleagues expected was that the alcohol would cause the Germans to be lenient in rating the quality of their Dutch in the test, while the Dutch would not give a higher score, but a lower one, to those who had consumed the vodka. . That is, they believed that the main effect of the spirit would be to affect the way in which a person appreciates the quality of their own command of the foreign language.
However, the results obtained offered a very different conclusion. The Germans who had consumed vodka did not tend to rate themselves higher than those who drank soda but in general terms they did receive significantly higher scores from the Dutch, both in overall speech quality and pronunciation.
Why is this happening? The disinhibition
Although the effects of alcohol on the nervous system are negative, it is reasonable that in very moderate quantities the harmful repercussions of this substance are barely noticeable and that, instead, other psychological consequences emerge that, although they are also discreet, are positive in nature. . The advantages of a slight disinhibition can be an example.
And when it comes to expressing ourselves in a foreign language, the fear of making a fool of ourselves when pronouncing certain words can cause a self-fulfilling prophecy effect, that is, leading us to pronounce things in an ostentatious or imprecise way so that we barely understand them. listen. A few drops of vodka could make these fears practically disappear, leaving us free to express ourselves in an intuitive and genuine way.
