As researchers from the Netherlands have found, alcohol helps to speak a foreign language better
As reported by Deutsche Welle, the study, whose results were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, involved 50 German students who had been studying Dutch for several months and had roughly the same level of proficiency. Dr. Fritz Renner and his assistants gave half of them alcoholic drinks before the tests, and the other half non-alcoholic drinks. The amount consumed by the first group was about half a liter of beer (with such alcohol content that it is legal to drive a car in Germany).
Then, five-minute conversations in Dutch were held with both groups (separately, of course). The conversations were recorded and later analyzed by both the study participants themselves and two independent experts whose native language was Dutch.
These experts came to a completely unambiguous conclusion: the German students who had a glass of wine or a beer spoke the foreign language noticeably better and with richer articulation. Their accent was significantly less pronounced.
What caused this? The study does not answer that. Nor does it answer whether a foreign language would improve even more if one drank more. The latter is, of course, doubtful. It is unlikely that, having drunk to the point of being dead drunk, we would suddenly become fluent in, say, English or French.
A colleague of the experimenters, Hans Rutger Bosker from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, generally doubts the correctness of the study's results. First, he believes the number of participants was too small. Among the 25 who drank, there could have been more people who were inherently better at speaking Dutch than in the other control group. For correctness and representativeness, the study should have involved many more people.
Second, Bosker emphasizes that the researchers' conclusions are based on the subjective opinion of two people – even if they are independent experts. And criteria from a 'scientific' point of view should be objective.
Nevertheless, Bosker does not criticize the researchers too harshly. It is quite possible that their conclusions are correct. And most importantly, the scientist notes, both those who conducted the study and its participants probably had a lot of fun. However, one should not overdo it.