MIT introduces a new study of polyglots, or people who speak more than five languages, that shows that language network activity lights up when they listen to any of the languages that they speak. This network responds to the language that the speaker is more proficient in. Research shows that the first language that someone acquires takes minimal effort for the brain to process.
The brain’s language processing network is located primarily in the left hemisphere which includes the frontal and temporal lobes. In this new study, the researchers wanted to expand on that finding and explore what happens in the brains of polyglots as they listen to languages in which they are proficient in. Studying polyglots help researchers learn more about the language network in the brain. For this study, 34 polyglots were recruited and 16 out of the 34 polyglots spoke more than 10 languages. There was one polyglot who spoke 54 languages with some proficiency. Each person’s brain was scanned with an MRI as they listened to a passage that was read in 8 different languages. This included their native language, a language they were highly proficient in, a language they were moderately proficient in, and a language where they had low proficiency. They were also scanned while they listened to four languages they were not familiar with at all. Two of the languages came from the same family of languages they spoke (like a romance language) and the other two languages were totally unrelated to any of the languages they spoke.
The brain scans reveal that the language network lit up the most when they listened to a language they were proficient in. This was very different from when they heard their native language. The language network of the brain did not lit up as much as it did when they heard their non-native language. This result proves that people are so proficient in their native language that it takes minimal effort to understand it and the language network doesn’t need to work as hard to understand the language. Additionally, researchers found that their language network was more engaged when listening to languages related to those they understood compared to the languages they didn’t understand at all. It was also concluded that the brain network known as the multiple language network turns on whenever the brain is performing a cognitively demanding task and is activated when listening to languages other than one’s native language.
Sources:
Kommentare