Software Development on the Cloud Exploration

Here is a silly, non-technical thought to round out the year.

Many years ago I read a scientific report of a study of multi-lingual stroke victims. The study found a very peculiar phenomenon. A portion of the stoke victims had learned multiple languages (2 or more) from birth, while another portion had acquired their polyglot skills later in life. When the people who had learned multiple,languages from birth had major strokes, they would often loose one of their languages completely, while their abilities in the other languages remained unimpaired. When the people who learned languages later in life had a major stroke, they would suffer impairment, but not total loss in all their languages. The conclusion of the study was that the organization of language in the brains of the two groups was quite different. Children who learned multiple languages from birth seemed to partition up their brains, using different parts for different languages, while people who added languages later spread their languages throughout their brains.

At the time, I took this as being proof that very young children learn languages in a different way from older people. I have seen several studies since that tend to support this conclusion. For example, I have read that past the age of eight, it is very difficult or impossible to be truly native in a foreign language, and your ability to learn a language from a different language group from your own (say Chinese if you are a native English speaker) diminishes rapidly after the age of 3. There are some languages that are so difficult that they have never been successfully learned as a foreign language and are only spoken by native speakers who started at birth.

So what made me think about this? Here you are going to laugh at me. Over the last month or so I have been trying to learn and write in 3 different computer languages - Python, Ruby and Javascript. Learning each language has not been difficult, but what has been more difficult has been keeping them separate. As I switch from one to the other, I often mistakenly attempt to apply an idiom I learned in one language to the other. As I was thinking about that, I suddenly realized that I may have drawn the wrong conclusion from the stroke victim study. One difference between the two groups is that one group learned multiple languages when  they were very young, and the other group learned them when they were older. But another difference is that the first group learned multiple languages simultaneously, while the other group probably learned their languages serially. Is it possible that putting different languages in different parts of the brain is the mind's solution to the problem of learning multiple languages simultaneously without mixing them up?
 
I think we need a followup study that tries to locate polyglot stroke victims who learned multiple foreign languages simultaneously later in life to see if they exhibit the same brain compartmentalization as those who learned simultaneously as infants. I wonder how many of those there are and how to find them. I imagine Santa Claus is one of them - presumably he speaks all the languages. Happy holidays to all of you.