Cerebral Cortex: Human brain processes native language in special way, study finds

Researchers from Harvard (USA) and Carleton (Canada) Universities have discovered that the brain of a person who speaks several languages reacts to the native language in a special way.

The results of the respective study were published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

A total of 34 multilingual people, each of whom had mastered five or more languages at least to some extent, but was not bilingual or multilingual as a child, took part in the study. One of the volunteers spoke 54 languages.

During the experiment, the participants had to listen to several texts in eight different languages. These included recordings in the participants' native language, as well as in the languages they spoke well, moderately, and poorly. During that time, the researchers continuously monitored, with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging, the brain activity of the test subjects.

The results showed that when the participants listened to the recordings in the language they were good at, the brain's language network was active the strongest.

The language network of the human brain covers its various parts, including the frontal parts of the temporal and cerebral cortex. That network “specializes” in speech perception.

Also, the researchers found that when perceiving the native language, that system hardly made any “effort" to understand and process the information.

According to the researchers, as the level of mastery of certain languages increases, the activeness of the language network drops considerably.