Picture this: it’s “Thirsty Thursday,” you have had one too many rum and cokes at the bar, and you begin to slur your words. Drinking alcohol affects every organ in your body. It is considered a depressant, so it slows down the activity of your central nervous system. Alcohol is absorbed from the stomach and small intestine into the bloodstream. Enzymes in the liver will metabolize the alcohol, but the liver can only metabolize a small amount of alcohol at a time which results in the excess alcohol circulating throughout the body. If you try to drink six rum and cokes in an hour on dollar drink night, it is likely you’ll experience the general effects of alcohol intoxication: impaired intellectual functioning leading to poor judgment, reduced reaction time, loss of coordination, and problems with speech production (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2017).

When considering the general effects of alcohol on the body, it is not hard to imagine why you have come home with scrapes and bruises on your legs after a night of heavy drinking. A loss of coordination and balance may increase your risk of falling and causing injury to yourself. In 2015, 26.9 percent of people ages 18 and older reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2017). Binge drinking is when an individual consumes a large quantity of drinks on a single occasion – for males, it is typically five or more drinks and for women, it is four or more – generally within a couple hours, bringing their blood alcohol concentration level to 0.08% or higher (CDC, 2017). So yes, your Thirsty Thursday shenanigans would be considered binge drinking. It is important to note that the general effects of alcohol on the body are temporary and it is likely that they will wear off after a few hours. However, it is possible to become addicted to drinking alcohol; the long-term effects of heavy drinking are more permanent and injurious.

But let’s focus on tonight: you go to order another round of drinks, but the bartender cuts you off because your order, “three rum and cokes,” comes out more like “free room and corks!” When you’re intoxicated, speech production has been found to be slower, lower in overall amplitude, and more prone to errors at the sentence, word, and phonological levels than when sober (Pisoni & Martin, 1989). This means it will take you longer to say your order to the bartender. You might be quieter, so she has a hard time hearing you. You are more likely to make errors like in the example above where “rum” comes out sounding more like “room.” Perhaps you even completely confuse the word “coke” with “cork” because you’re in that drinking mentality. The nature of the sound errors in the study by Pisoni and Martin (1989) suggests that alcohol reduces the control and coordination of speech articulation, phonation, and respiration.

Fast-forward six years: you just bought a house with your fiancé and you are expecting. Since college you have abandoned the rum and cokes, but now you drink about three glasses of Pinot Grigio per night with dinner. There is no way that you can give up wine completely even though you are pregnant. In the worst-case scenario, your inability to give up drinking during your pregnancy will lead to your child developing fetal alcohol syndrome. Prenatal exposure to alcohol could cause your child to develop physical abnormalities and long-term impairments in cognition and behavior. They might struggle on tasks of attention, intelligence, executive functioning, visual spatial ability, memory, and finally – language (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011).

It should come as no surprise that a child will be severely impaired in various ways if they are exposed to alcohol during the most crucial period of development. Based upon the extensive list of negative effects that alcohol has on the fully-grown human body after just a few drinks at the bar, imagine what damage alcohol can do to a fetus. Fetal alcohol syndrome will not have affected children slurring their words when they begin to talk. But, children with the disorder may exhibit a broader range of impairments involving word articulation, naming ability, word comprehension, and both expressive and receptive language (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011). Word articulation is related to speech and the ability to properly pronounce a word. Naming ability might involve differentiating between nouns and verbs. Word comprehension is whether the child understand s the meaning of the word. Expressive language is being able to put your own thoughts into words and sentences in a way that is grammatically correct and will make sense to others. Receptive language refers to a person’s ability to understand another person’s words or sentences and what they mean. While these deficits may be observed in everyday interactions, neuroimaging research conducted on individuals with fetal alcohol syndrome confirms functional impairments measured by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Multiple areas of the brain were affected, including the temporal lobe which is involved in language (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011).

Many studies and replications of studies have been conducted in an effort to identify a specific set of deficits that plague those with fetal alcohol syndrome. Unfortunately, research yields contradictory results as language is very complex and there are so many tests of one’s linguistic abilities. The sample size (the number of people being observed) along with the demographics of the population (age, income, education) may cause the data to vary as well.

Therefore, no core deficit, profile or consistent pattern of difficulties has yet been identified in this population (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011). So, there is no determined list of impairments that applies to all individuals suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. This may have to do with limitations in research or it could be that fetal alcohol syndrome affects every individual’s linguistic abilities in different ways due to how much alcohol the mother consumed, when the mother consumed alcohol, and many other factors related to her consumption habits.

However, researchers can agree on one thing: those with fetal alcohol syndrome struggle with interpersonal language (Wyper & Rasmussen, 2011). In addition to behavioral problems, interpersonal language difficulties will negatively affect a person’s ability to function in social settings; they may have trouble interacting with peers, teachers, and bosses. Since there is no specific set of deficits that has been identified, treatment must be customized to fit the individual challenges of the person with the disorder. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a consequence of alcohol which impacts all aspects of the affected person’s life. Even worse, fetal alcohol syndrome is completely preventable and those that are affected by it have no control over their condition.

If alcohol has all these negative effects, then why do people continue to drink? Often served in social settings, alcohol helps you become more relaxed because it lowers your inhibitions, making it easier to interact with others. Also, consuming alcohol may alleviate stress as it provides a sense of relief and dissociation from reality. A person may temporarily forget the things that are stressing them out when they consume alcohol (West Virginia University School of Public Health, n.d.).

In small amounts, alcohol can be helpful – even in regards to language. Renner, Kersbergen, Field, and Werthmann (2017) set out to test the effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-rated and observer-rated verbal foreign language performance in participants who have recently learned a language. The researchers wanted to see if bilinguals would rate their performance on a verbal foreign language task better or worse after consuming a small amount of alcohol or after consuming water. In addition, they wanted to see how observers – unaware of what the participants are drinking – would rate them.

It is a popular belief that alcohol improves one’s ability to speak in a foreign language. The researchers in this study thought differently. As previously mentioned, alcohol consumption affects cognitive functioning which includes inhibitory control and working memory which are necessary for fluent production, processing and comprehension of language. When someone is learning, or speaking a foreign language, lexical items (words or vocabulary of a language) from both the foreign and native language are activated and they compete for selection. Therefore, when speaking a foreign language, a person must depend partially on an inhibitory control mechanism which will allow the individual to select the item they are looking for (word from the foreign language) rather than the competing item (word from the native language). Because alcohol impairs inhibitory control, then it can be expected that alcohol would impair one’s ability to speak a foreign language properly (Renner, Kersbergen, Field, & Werthmann, 2017).

Knowing this information about executive functioning and the effects of alcohol, researchers’ predictions did not agree with the popular belief. They hypothesized that participants who consumed alcohol would rate their perceived foreign language performance as better, while those who consumed water would not rate their performance any better than they initially rated it. Researchers thought that the alcohol might give participants in that condition a heightened sense of self-confidence. Because the observers were unaware of what participants drank, researchers hypothesized that observers would give lower ratings to the participants who consumed alcohol in comparison to those who drank water (Renner, Kersbergen, Field, & Werthmann, 2017).

In the alcohol condition, experimenters aimed to achieve a moderate blood alcohol level of about 0.4%, so participants in that condition were instructed to finish the drink within ten minutes. Then, both sets of participants – those drinking alcohol and those drinking water – were instructed to argue for or against animal testing in Dutch for two minutes. The discussion was audio recorded. Before and directly after the foreign language performance task, participants rated their spoken Dutch performance as an index of subjective foreign language skills. Native Dutch speakers were asked to rate the performance of the participants as well; these observer-raters were unaware that some participants had consumed alcohol and others had not. Experimenters tested the participants’ self-esteem before the experiment and after the language task using the Rosenberg Self Esteem scale which consists of 10 items including questions like “On the whole, I am satisfied with myself” to which participants must select: 3- strongly agree, 2-agree, 1-disagree, or 4-strongly disagree (Renner, Kersbergen, Field, & Werthmann, 2017).

Contrary to the hypothesis, participants who consumed alcohol did not significantly differ from the participants who drank water when asked to rate their foreign language skills. Experimenters thought that participants would rate their abilities higher after consuming alcohol. Again, contrary to the hypothesis, experimenters thought that observers would rate the foreign language abilities of those who consumed alcohol as poorer than those who consumed water, but observers actually rated the language performances of participants who consumed alcohol as better than that of those who consumed water. Lastly, the results from the self-esteem tests showed that alcohol consumption had no impact on self-esteem ratings (Renner, Kersbergen, Field, & Werthmann, 2017).

A possible explanation for these findings may be related to alcohol’s disinhibiting effects. If people have “language anxiety” meaning they feel tension or apprehension specifically associated with second language contexts, then they might perform worse on language tasks compared to people who have low levels of language anxiety. A small dose of alcohol may help reduce this tension and allow foreign language speakers to speak more fluently in the foreign language. At higher levels of alcohol intoxication, participants in the alcohol condition may have had more trouble selecting the foreign item they were looking for, resulting in speech disfluency. Slurred speech may accompany higher levels of alcohol intoxication as well, making the participants more difficult to understand which would likely lead to observers reporting lower ratings (Renner, Kersbergen, Field, & Werthmann, 2017).

As you all know, when it comes to alcohol, moderation is key. But, when you are pregnant there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink, no safe time during pregnancy to drink, and no safe type of alcohol to drink. Even if you just want a small glass of wine to improve the fluency of your Italian, it is important to resist the urge to drink if you are pregnant to preserve your child’s ability to communicate and understand language which is such a vital part of our everyday lives (National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, n.d.). While participating in Thirsty Thursday can be fun, there are dangers that accompany binge-drinking as well. It is important to develop healthy habits early in your life as they may set the tone for your future drinking habits.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017). Alcohol & public health: Frequently asked questions. Retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. (2017). Alcohol facts and statistics. Retrieved from: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-And-statistics.

National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Is it safe for a woman to have an occasional beer, glass of wine, or other alcoholic beverage when she is pregnant? Retrieved from: https://www.nofas.org/light-drinking/.

Pisoni, D.B., & Martin, C.S. (1989). Effects of alcohol on the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech: Perceptual and acoustic analysis. Alcoholism Clinical & Experimental Research, 13(4), 577-587.

Renner F., Kersbergen, I., Field, M. & Werthmann, J. (2017) Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills. Journals of Psychopharmacology, 1-7.

West Virginia University School of Public Health. Why people drink: Alcohol awareness. Retrieved from: http://publichealth.hsc.wvu.edu/alcohol/effects-on-society/why-people-drink/.

Wyper, K.R., & Rasmussen, C.R. (2011). Language impairments in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Journal of Population Therapeutics & Clinical Pharmacology, 18(2), 364-376.