L1 part of the brain turned off making way for L2?

Post Reply New Topic

My L1 is English and my L2 is Japanese, which I began learning in adulthood; my dominant language is English. I can understand Japanese pretty well, but I have difficulty forming sentences in my mind and don't think in it very often. This morning, however, I had a very strange experience.

I woke up feeling kind of weird, a bit light-headed. For a short while, I felt like I couldn't catch my breath which worried me because I've been getting over a cold. When I thought about stuff, I noticed I thought pretty much only in Japanese, with perhaps some English fragments. As I thought and thought, it was largely only Japanese, and I formed sentences in my head with much greater ease than before, though still with some difficulty, and the Japanese way of forming sentences seemed more natural. I got up and read and watched stuff in Japanese. Normally, I read mostly in English, but I was particularly drawn to reading and watching stuff in Japanese, even difficult things to read when most of the time I just gave up.

I realized I was hungry and went to get something to eat. I was very clumsy, spilling stuff everywhere. It was like I was very uncoordinated. I then got my coordination under control and no longer felt funny or dizzy, but at the same time I found that I started thinking in English again and it was again difficult to form sentences in Japanese in my head. My thinking was now again primarily in English!

I guess what happens is that my English interferes with my Japanese? And this morning the English part of my brain was turned off for some reason (along with my motor coordination) ending the interference with my Japanese? In that case, what caused my English to turn off? Is there a way I can induce it to help with practice?

It's well-documented that L1 can be completely lost in favour of L2 in childhood, but this is the first I've heard of it in adulthood. I learned Japanese but I can't say it ever displaced English except for some very minor, involuntary accent changes when speaking in English.

I didn't exactly lose it, only that part of the brain seemed turned off. I could still comprehend English when I came across it and all that, but it's like when I thought about something it just wouldn't come up; Japanese would come up instead, even without meaning to. I like your comment, though, because it helps me talk out and clarify my experience.

I know I can get migraine-like phenomena sometimes without the headaches. There are times when my vision gets blurry and I see flashing lights for 20-30 minutes, like maybe once a month or so. And one time when I had it I noticed my words got all jumbled up, which was like 10 years ago. Migraines can affect language during episodes, so maybe it was something like that. And since I learned Japanese as an adult, it's very likely it's stored in a different part of my brain from where English is stored (I've seen research on this), so only that part of the brain where English was located was affected but not the part where Japanese was located. (Because English is my dominant language, it's normally preferred when I think which interferes with attempts to use Japanese, but I guess the preference was temporarily weakened or something.)