Drinking a little alcohol may improve language proficiency

Drinking a small amount of alcohol may improve the level of pronunciation in second languages.

It has long been part of popular culture that drinking alcoholic beverages can help us to consumption of alcoholic beverages can help us become more proficient in languages that are not our mother tongue. languages that are not our mother tongue. In fact, there are cases in which this belief has gone to the extreme, and proof of this is that on Facebook there is a page with more than 100,000 followers called "Getting drunk increases my ability to speak other languages".

It is already known that many of these beliefs that pass from mouth to ear are more myth than reality, and in particular, the idea that intoxicating ourselves with spirits can make us speak better languages is more of a joke than the truth (in this state we even find it difficult to 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 command of languages that we don't speak in moderation? our command of languages that we do not speak at a native level?? A recent study suggests that the answer is yes.

Alcohol: neural and psychological effects

That alcohol has negative effects on the brain has long been known. The amount of money made by the alcohol industry has not obscured the way 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 voluminous, and and the neural interconnections in some of their areas are less numerous than in healthy brains. than in healthy brains; this is noticeable, among other things, in their ability to make use of memory, since they have an impaired 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 class of products. Specifically, a team of scientists at Maastricht University led by Fritz Renner set out to test whether drinking a little alcohol temporarily improves the way a newly learned language is spoken. the way a newly learned language is spoken (in adults, of course). (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 conduct this research, Renner and his colleagues used an experimental-type 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 Maastricht, a city where many people from Germany go due to its proximity to the border separating the two territories.

In addition, in order to pass from Germany to the University of Maastricht, you have to stop first for a Dutch language level test.In addition, in order to pass from Germany to Maastricht University, you must first pass a Dutch language test, so that practically all of these students had a level of Dutch that allowed them to speak the language.

To start with the experimental conditions, the volunteers were divided into two groups: one group drank 250 ml. of sparkling water, and the other group drank the same amount of sparkling water. the other group drank the same amount of lemonade with a little vodka(the amount of ml. of alcohol each person drank depended on their sex and body mass so that everyone had 0.04%).

A quarter of an hour after consuming the drinks, at a stage in the experiment when the alcohol should have already passed into the Blood and brain, the volunteers were asked to discuss the animal experiment in Dutch for a couple of minutes. From this exercise, two native Dutch speakers were 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 speech quality.. In addition, the Germans were 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 Germans to be lenient in rating the quality of their Dutch in the test, while the Dutch would give a lower, rather than a higher, score to those who had consumed the vodka. In other words, they believed that the main effect of the spirit would be to affect the way in which a person appreciates the quality of his or her own command of the foreign language.

However, the results obtained offered a very different conclusion. Germans who had consumed vodka did not rate themselves better than those who drank soda, but overall they did rate themselves better than those who drank vodka.but overall they did receive significantly higher scores from the Dutch, both in overall speech quality and pronunciation.

Why does this happen? 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 hardly noticeable and that, instead, other psychological consequences emerge which, although also discrete, are of a positive nature. The benefits of slight disinhibition can be an example..

When 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, i.e. lead us to pronounce things in an awkward or imprecise way so that they are hardly heard. A few drops of vodka could make these fears practically disappear, leaving us free to express ourselves in an intuitive and genuine way.