PARIS — If you’re a polyglot, you’ve probably already noticed how little effort it takes to think and express yourself in your native tongue. An American study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, examines this phenomenon and shows that our brains process the first language we learn differently from others.
The academics behind this research drew on the findings of a 2021 study, which suggested that the brain of a polyglot is less active than that of a person who speaks just one language when it has to process information in their native tongue. The researchers wanted to investigate this finding further, to understand what actually happens in the brains of polyglots when they listen to languages they are more or less proficient in.
Evelina Fedorenko, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues conducted an experiment involving some 30 individuals speaking at least five languages. While some of the volunteers were more multilingual than others, they all had one thing in common: they were not multilingual “from infancy.”
Each participant had to listen to passages from the Bible and “Alice in Wonderland” being read in eight different languages — some of which they didn’t speak — while the researchers analysed their neural activity using a functional MRI scanner. The academics found that the polyglots’ brains reacted differently depending on the language they were listening to.
Language processing networks, located in the left cerebral hemisphere, were most engaged when participants listened to languages in which they were most proficient. However, they did not engage very much when the participants heard their native language. Evelina Fedorenko hypothesises that the brain is activated to a lesser extent with a native language because it is the one with which we are most familiar. ”The findings suggest there is something unique about the first language one acquires, which allows the brain to process it with minimal effort,” according to the researchers via a press release.
Additionally, the researchers noted that a brain network known as the “multiple demand network” is activated when listening to languages that differ from one’s mother tongue. This finding is significant, given that the multiple demand network is involved in the performance of complex and demanding cognitive tasks. This proves that our brains are better able to process information in a language we have mastered since childhood.
Most of the polyglots in this study began learning a language other than the one they grew up with as teenagers or adults. In the future, researchers plan to study the brains of people who are multilingual from childhood onwards. Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that mastering several languages is a good way to maintain brain health. Multilingualism, for example, has been shown to delay the onset of dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.
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