By Sharin Hussain via SWNS
The brain ‘switches off’ when speaking your native language, even if you speak several others, a new study reveals.
When multi-linguists listen to their own mother tongue, the brain network activity drops off significantly, researchers found.
The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied people who spoke many languages but were not brought up to speak more than one.
One participant spoke 54 languages but their brain still found their mother tongue a breeze.
The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, suggest there is something unique about the first language learned, which allows the brain to process it with minimal effort.
Senior author, Professor Evelina Fedorenko said: “Something makes it a little bit easier to process — maybe it’s that you’ve spent more time using that language — and you get a dip in activity for the native language compared to other languages that you speak proficiently.”
The brain’s language processing network, located primarily in the left hemisphere, includes regions in the frontal and temporal lobes.
Fedorenko added: “With polyglots, you can do all of the comparisons within one person. You have languages that vary along a continuum, and you can try to see how the brain modulates responses as a function of proficiency.”
Researchers recruited 34 polyglots, people who spoke five or more languages but were not bilingual or multilingual from infancy.
One participant spoke 54 languages whilst another 15 spoke 10 or more languages.
Each participant was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they listened to passages read in eight different languages.
These included their native language, a language they were highly proficient in and a language in which they described themselves as having low proficiency.
They were scanned while listening to four languages they didn’t speak at all, with two similar to ones they knew and two that were new to them.
The passages were from a set of Bible stories and the story of “Alice in Wonderland” was recorded in different languages.
Brain scans revealed that the language network lit up the most when participants listened to languages they were skilled at.
Brain activity was reduced for their native tongue which suggests that people are so proficient in their own language that the language network doesn’t need to work very hard to interpret it.
Fedorenko said: “As you increase proficiency, you can engage in linguistic computations to a greater extent, so you get these progressively stronger responses.
“But then if you compare a really high-proficiency language and a native language, it may be that the native language is just a little bit easier, possibly because you’ve had more experience with it.”
Researchers found that their language network was more engaged when listening to languages related to a language that they could understand than compared to listening to completely unfamiliar languages.
Lead author, doctoral student Saima Malik-Moraleda said: “Here we’re getting a hint that the response in the language network scales up with how much you understand from the input.
“We didn’t quantify the level of understanding here, but in the future, we’re planning to evaluate how much people are truly understanding the passages that they’re listening to, and then see how that relates to the activation.”
The multiple-demand 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.
Dr. Malik-Moraleda concludes: “What we’re seeing here is that the language regions are engaged when we process all these languages, and then there’s this other network that comes in for non-native languages to help you out because it’s a harder task.”
