Drinking a little alcohol can improve language proficiency

It has long been part of popular culture that the consumption of alcoholic beverages can help us to better master languages They 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 have more myth than reality, and specifically, the idea that intoxicating ourselves with spirits can make us talk better languages ​​has more of a joke than truth (in that state it is even difficult for us 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 do not speak natively? A recent study suggests that the answer is yes.

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Alcohol: neural and psychological effects

That alcohol has negative effects on the brain has been known for a long time. The amount of money moved by the industry that sells this type of product has not made the way in which that these substances harm us in multiple ways, although certain alcoholic products are better advertised than others.

For example, the brains of people with a history of alcoholism tend to be somewhat smaller and the neural interconnections of some of its areas are less numerous than in healthy brains; This can be seen, among other things, in their ability to make use of memory, since they have a hippocampus damaged, and in their management of emotions and impulses in real time.

However, beyond the direct effects that alcohol ingested in high amounts has on the system nervous, it is not unreasonable that in moderate amounts there are certain advantages related to this class of products. Specifically, a team of scientists from Maastricht University led by Fritz Renner set out to see if 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.

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The effect of alcohol when speaking foreign languages

To bring about this investigation, Renner and his colleagues used an experimental study with 50 volunteers whose mother tongue is German. These people were German students who were in their second year of their Psychology degree at the University of Maastrich, a city to which many people from the German country come due to its proximity to the border that separates both territories.

In addition, in order to transfer from Germany to Maastricht University, You have to stop first for a Dutch level testTherefore, practically all these students had a level of this language that allowed them to speak it.

To start with the experimental conditions, the volunteers were divided into two groups: one of them drank 250 ml. sparkling water, and the other drank the same amount of lemonade with 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 their body mass so that everyone presented that 0.04%).

A quarter of an hour after having consumed the drinks, in a phase of the experiment in which the alcohol should already have passed into blood and brain, the volunteers were asked to discuss animal experimentation in Dutch for a couple of minutes. minutes. Based on 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. In addition, the Germans had to rate themselves on how well or poorly they spoke Dutch.

The surprising result

What Renner and his colleagues hoped was that alcohol would make Germans benevolent in rating the quality of food. their Dutch on 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 have to rate themselves higher than those who had drunk soda, but in general terms they did receive significantly higher scores from the Dutch, both in overall speech quality and in pronunciation.

Why is this happening? disinhibition

Although the effects of alcohol on the nervous system are negative, it is reasonable that in very moderate amounts the harmful repercussions of this substance are hardly noticed and that, instead, other psychological consequences emerge that, although they are also discrete, are of a positive. The advantages of a slight disinhibition can be an example.

And it is that when expressing ourselves in a foreign language, the fear of making a fool of ourselves when pronouncing certain words can cause a effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that is, leading us to pronounce things in an ostentatious or imprecise way so that we are barely aware of them. listen. A few drops of vodka could make these fears virtually disappear, leaving us free to express ourselves in an intuitive and genuine way.