Cognitive Psychology Blog Post 3
Lesson 11: Language
Flemish and Walloon – Vlaams/Français

Language is vital – it is the only way we can communicate with others, and there are many thousands of languages in the world that we can use for communication (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Introduction; Lesson 11: Language: Introduction to language; Goldstein 298-299). Without the ability to use language, our ability to develop as a species would likely have been in serious doubt (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Introduction to language; Goldstein 298-299).

My own relationship with language is personal, intricate, and life-long. I was born in Belgium and spent my childhood there with my parents, who had experienced living in Belgium twice prior to my birth. Belgium has three official languages. Whilst we all have English as our mother-tongue, we can also speak French (Walloon) and Dutch (Flemish) and my Father can speak some German. However, you have to practice otherwise you can get rusty!

I remember my Mother attending a ‘Commune’ language school eight hours per week for years and years – learning how to speak and write Dutch, French, and German (both my parents lived and worked in Belgium for seventeen years). When we lived in our house in a Dutch-speaking commune at weekends, we had to speak Dutch when needing to do identity card business etc. in the “Gemeentehuis” or town hall, because employees refused to speak English in this official office. During the week, when at our home in a French “Commune”, we had to speak French in that town hall. My Mum found the Dutch language challenging – as I know from my own experience, Dutch has a reputation for being illogical (although it is very close to German). French and German were easier for my parents because both she and my Father had studied these two languages from the age of eleven in school in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, my Mother told me that the Scots with their Scottish accent could pronounce the Dutch “guttural” words much more easily than the English. My Mother’s experience with new languages has a scientific basis in cognitive psychology – learning to speak a new language becomes more complicated with age (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Speech Perception).

Children who are eight years of age or younger tend to pick up new languages more easily than older children, teenagers, and adults (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Speech Perception). I was consciously exposed to Dutch and French since kindergarten. I studied these languages – with an emphasis on French – at an international school in Belgium throughout my elementary and middle school years, alongside students who had varying cultural backgrounds and who had been exposed to dual languages from birth (many of us were “third-culture kids”). However, English was the dominant language at my school, and I can recall some students learning English as a second language and picking it up easily (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Speech Perception). In high school, I learned Spanish and resumed my French studies with a personal tutor – a native French speaker from Belgium. I am still fluent in French, and I have been told by my French tutor that I speak the language with a Belgian accent that I have apparently retained from my childhood!

I can relate my own experiences with language to this course. When I was learning Spanish in high school, I had difficulty telling where one word stopped and another started. According to the Penn State notes, speech is continuous, and breaks in words are auditory illusions, yet native speakers of a language can perceive words stopping and starting, while those new to a certain language struggle to distinguish the start and finish of words (Penn State Lesson 11: Language: Speech Perception).

Scientific experiments over the past twenty years have indicated that the structure of both white and gray matter in the brain can continue their plasticity during adulthood. Testing methods have been carried out by trials of a group of adults studying a challenging foreign language, for example, Chinese, and scanning (“… longitudinal diffusion tensor imaging …”) their brains and comparing them to a group of participants who did not learn a foreign language (Rudelson, Schlegel, Tse 2012). Those conducting the trials found that there were significant alterations in white brain matter.

Looking at gray matter changes, a similar experiment to assess gray matter volume has been carried out during a trial period when participants studied a foreign language. Changes in gray matter volume, identified by magnetic resonance images and cognitive testing, showed those who studied the foreign language had increased gray matter afterwards. However, this result was only predictable when tested on post short-term memory tasks.
The above experiments could overturn the long-held theory that “… plastic reorganization …” of the brain is not limited to children alone (Rudelson, Schlegel, Tse 2012).

Works Cited –
Bellander, Martin, et al. “Behavioral correlates of changes in hippocampal gray matter structure during acquisition of foreign vocabulary.” NIH National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, 1 May 2016, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26477659/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.
Goldstein, B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ed., pp. 298-299). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.
Lesson 11: Language: Creativity of language. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027147
Lesson 11: Language: Introduction. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027145
Lesson 11: Language: Introduction to language. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027146
Lesson 11: Language: Speech perception. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027150
Rudelson, Justin J., et al. “White matter structure changes as adults learn a second language.” NIH National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health, 24 Aug. 2012, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22571459/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.

Lesson 6
LTM Structure
Introduction
A Four-year-old Remembers an American Tragedy
Memory is an active experience of building a representation of your world. Long-term memory is not like hitting a “rewind” button on a video recorder and seeing what actually happened. When you revisit your memories, you see an approximation of what happened, depending on how you perceived what happened and what you registered as important (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Introduction).
An example of a Long-Term Memory from my Life
Although now American, I was born a British citizen in Belgium. One of my first memories is of missing my Mother and seeing her in a white room, which was strange to me. She was not in our home. Many years later, my Mother told me she had been in a hospital of the Cliniques de l’Europe-Site St-Elisabeth, Uccle, in Belgium. I remember she left hospital in a chair on wheels – “Mummy’s home now”. I only learned what had happened years later – she had had an operation on a knee. Additional facts came to me in later years – that when we arrived in her hospital room post-surgery, my Father told my Mother he had just talked with my maternal Grandmother to tell her how my Mother’s surgery had gone. My Grandmother (living in England), in turn, told him about the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the Word Trade Center in New York, so thousands of people were dying horrific deaths as my Mother was regaining consciousness – (Central European Time is six hours ahead of New York).
Later that afternoon, my Father and I picked my Mother up from the Cliniques de l’Europe-Site St-Elisabeth in Uccle near Brussels, Belgium. Again, as I was growing up, I learned, as soon as we drove out of the hospital from Rue du Fré and onto the Chaussée de Waterloo, that there were uniformed police officers armed with rifles, and guns in their holsters, lining the Chaussée de Waterloo for fear of a similar attack in Brussels – possibly at the European Parliament or at NATO headquarters. Every time we visit our home in Couture St German, Lasne, Waterloo, I have a very strong memory of this event. One week after 9/11 my Father had to fly to New York on business. It was touch-and-go as to whether he could make the trip owing to whether or not my Mother would be able to walk and look after me following her surgery. In the event, he did go to New York and was able to witness first-hand the site of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Like so many people, the memory of this catastrophic event will stay with me for the rest of my life. Only eight years later we would emigrate to America and live in New York State, and the memory would resonate more than ever.
Analysis of my Long-Term Memory Remembrance
The incident I have related would be an episodic memory with semantic elements (Penn State L06 Episodic and Semantic Memories in the Brain). This is my earliest long-term memory – I added to this distinct memory. I was four years of age, but in subsequent years I learned more and more about what happened on 9/11 (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Differences Between Long-Term Memory (LTM) and Short-Term Memory (STM); Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Different Types of Long-Term Memories).
Long-Term memories are preserved mainly by semantic coding in the hippocampus. Therefore, my awareness of the events on 9/11 is an example of semantic coding, because I know the date, what happened in New York on that date, and why it is important (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Coding in LTM; Penn State Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: STM and LTM Differences in the Brain).
My semantic memory of 9/11 is inextricably linked with my episodic memories of our experiences in the hospital in Belgium on that day – seeing my Mother in a very different place, and not at home with me, plus my Father’s absence soon after because of his subsequent trip to New York (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Semantic Memories).
According to the Penn State notes, this would be an explicit episodic memory, because I was aware of processing a significant and personal event in my young life. I am comparing and contrasting my episodic memories of the event I lived through in Belgium with my semantic memories of the facts surrounding 9/11 (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Different Types of Long-Term Memories).
Conclusion
This is an episodic memory – my Mother was missing and I was missing her and I remember how it affected me – “Mummy’s gone now” (Penn State Lesson 6 Long-Term Memory: Structure: Episodic Memories). I recall learning what happened in New York on 9/11, and how eager I was to learn more. More frequently than visiting Belgium, we go to New York City, and it always comes to my mind every single time.

Works Cited –
Goldstein, B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience (4th ed., pp. 152-166). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Coding in LTM. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027097
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Differences between Long-Term Memory (LTM) and Short-Term Memory (STM). (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027095
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Different types of Long-Term Memories. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027099
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Episodic and Semantic Memories in the brain. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027102
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Episodic Memories. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027100
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Introduction. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027094
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: Semantic Memories. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027101
Lesson 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure: STM and LTM differences in the brain. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027098

Introduction
How did a 30-year-old English woman with a loving husband of eight years and a fulfilling job and comfortable home suddenly make a suicide attempt which nearly took her life? Below, I will tell the real-life story of how this happened to my Mother, showing how she descended into severe mental illness in a very short space of time. I aim to show how top-down processing can both succeed and fail.
Background
When you are young, top-down processing cannot always help you overcome life’s difficulties, simply because you have not had enough life experience to draw upon. Therefore, perception is at risk. I aim to explain how my Mother came to suddenly perceive the world around her in a very distorted way, and how her sheltered past upbringing and experiences had by no means prepared her for what she was about to live through. Aspiring to what she envisioned to be an improved way of life, she and my Father made decisions which were too drastic a change for her mind to healthily process. Life’s previous fragile scaffolding crumbled to dust.
I can here relate, because I have her permission, my Mother’s descent into severe depression and anxiety in 1989, when she made an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and was “sectioned” in a psychiatric hospital in Northumberland, England, for two months. It would be two years before she made a full recovery and was free of anti-depressant medication. This very rapid decline in my Mother’s mental health came about, she realized many years later, because she had seen, through very troubled sight perception, her new living circumstances and environment’s problems as grossly exaggerated in her mind. She believed the only way out was to take her life.
Relevance to now
I can contrast 1989’s past experience with one that befell my Mother again only ten days ago, on September 1st. Having escaped Hurricane Henri completely, with only hard rain expected from Hurricane Ida, on August 31, at 10.45 pm, we received an emergency alert on our mobile phones of a tornado about to hit Lloyd Neck, Long Island, where we live for part of the year. Minutes later, our densely wooded neighborhood was hit by that tornado, bringing devastation to 136 houses and land.
History
In 1989, my Mother’s illness manifested itself after she and my Father relocated yet again, owing to his job, to the north-east of England from the Manchester area. They bought a large property made of stone in Northumberland with two acres of land and views of a castle and the North Sea. Once again, my Mother had given up a job she loved and a home in Cheshire which could be described as regular residential living, with a small garden in an attractive small town where they had lived very happily for three years.
In remote and wild Northumberland, unaccustomed to having to look after two acres of land, my Mother looked out of the house windows to extensive areas of what had been vegetable gardens, turning into swathes of fast growing weeds, requiring my Father to purchase a flame-gun to keep them at bay. In addition, there were large areas of grass to be cut, and tall, thick privet hedges to be trimmed. My Mother’s eyes perceived the garden greenery as threatening and encroaching. When my Father took my Mother out at the weekends to try to take her away from the home environment, she could not bear to see trees and leaves. The house also needed some renovation and redecorating. My Mother’s background had given her no preparation for the reality of such projects. Very soon, she could no longer eat or sleep. A social creature, she felt the loss of her work colleagues and a rewarding job very badly. She was extremely lonely, and her life felt out of control. My Father, coming from a family of extremely strong women, both physically and mentally, had no understanding of my Mother’s deterioration, telling her he had bought the house she said she wanted. In addition to the distorted sense of vision, now my Mother perceived she was under attack from what she was hearing from my Father. All of life’s supports had fallen away. In early May 1989, my Mother swallowed in the region of 75 paracetamol tablets and went to bed. In the middle of the night, she told my Father what she had done, and was taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, but the pills had already been absorbed into her body. The paracetamol was neutralized by intravenous drugs. The hospital into which she had been admitted had no beds available and she was placed in a female geriatric ward. Awake and vomiting all night, she saw several elderly women die during that night. Her relationship with my Father (they had been married 9 years) broke down, but they never separated or divorced, and were eventually counselled by a social worker for about six months. They have now been married for forty-one years and relocated sixteen times owing to my Father’s employment (including two different continents and three countries).
September 2021
When the tornado struck ten days ago, approximately 15 of our very substantial, tall oak trees fell to the ground, with foliage debris spread all over the two acres. Already shocked from many house deterioration problems owing to us having been absent from this house for eighteen months (Covid-19, my Mother’s new hip operation in June), my Mother felt anxiety and depression creeping back. She experienced difficulty getting her anxiety level down. Having been ill in 1989, and having experienced post-natal depression following my birth, my Mother can now recognize her susceptibility to fast mental deterioration and the important signs that can take her down. She rallied – by now she had lived through two periods of debilitating depression.
Conclusion
So why in 2011 did my parents decide to buy another big house with the same amount of land as some twenty-two years previous? The answer is probably that although the mind retains some life lessons, memory can play tricks if you have lived through many life changes and experiences. You have jumped so many hurdles already, you become drawn and acclimatized to taking on yet more challenges because you gain confidence again. Over the years, your clever brain has processed a vast quantity of information, but the future is always going to be a dodgy navigation because emotion is always involved. The dream of an ideal living location lives on, and when you believe yourself well again, mistakes can so easily be repeated. Top-down perception can alleviate some of the mental anguish.

Works Cited –
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th ed., pp. 59-62). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.
Top-Down processing. (n.d.). In Penn State World Campus. Retrieved September 7, 2021, from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules/items/33027059