Using Mechanical Tools Improves Our Language Skills
upstart writes:
Using mechanical tools improves our language skills:
Our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences is one of the most difficult language skills to acquire. In 2019, research had revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study, by researchers from Inserm, CNRS, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon and Universite Lumiere Lyon in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and-vice-versa-syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools. These findings could be applied clinically to support the rehabilitation of patients having lost some of their language skills. This study is published in November 2021 in the journal Science.
[...] Research suggests that brain areas, which control certain linguistic functions, such as the processing of word meanings, are also involved in controlling fine motor skills. However, brain imaging had not provided evidence of such links between language and the use of tools. Paleo-neurobiology has also shown that the brain regions associated with language had increased in our ancestors during periods of technological boom, when the use of tools became more widespread.
When considering this data, research teams couldn't help wondering: what if the use of certain tools, which involves complex movements, relies on the same brain resources as those mobilized in complex linguistic functions such as syntax?
[...] They discovered for the first time that the handling of the tool and the syntax exercises produced brain activations in common areas, with the same spatial distribution, in a region called the "basal ganglia."
Given that these two skill types use the same brain resources, is it possible to train one in order to improve the other? Does motor training with the mechanical tongs improve the understanding of complex phrases? In the second part of their study, the scientists looked at these issues and showed that this is indeed the case.
Journal Reference:
Tool use and language share syntactic processes and neural patterns in the basal ganglia, Simon Thibault, et. al.,Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abe0874)
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