[ti:Study of Polyglots Shows How Brain Deals with Language]
[al:Science & Technology]
[ar:VOA]
[dt:2024-03-25]
[by:www.voase.cn]
[00:00.00]Most people around the world speak one or two languages.
[00:06.17]But some can speak three or more. 
[00:09.23]These people are called polyglots. 
[00:11.86]And they are helping researchers better understand how the human brain deals with language.
[00:19.94]In a new study, a team of scientists monitored the brain activity of 34 polyglots.
[00:27.46]The polyglots spoke between five and 54 languages.
[00:33.77]The scientists used a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. 
[00:41.16]In fMRI, the brain is studied through images that measure changes in blood flow in different areas of the brain. 
[00:50.32]The researchers used fMRI to study the brain as the polyglots listened to different languages.
[00:57.75]The researchers found that, when the polyglots heard a language they knew, activity increased in an area of the brain involved with language processing. 
[01:09.39]That area is the cerebral cortex. When they listened to a language they did not know or knew less well, there was less activity in the cerebral cortex.
[01:21.01]Evelina Fedorenko is a brain scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
[01:33.38]She was also a senior writer of the study, which recently appeared in the publication Cerebral Cortex.
[01:41.46]She explained the findings.
[01:45.04]"We think this is because when you process a language that you know well, you can engage the full suite of linguistic operations - the operations that the language system in your brain supports," Fedorenko said.
[02:00.11]However, an exception caught the attention of the researchers. 
[02:04.55]For many of the polyglot participants, listening to their native language produced less of a brain response compared to hearing other languages they knew.
[02:15.27]On average, the response was about 25 percent less.
[02:20.76]And in some of the polyglots, listening to their native language activated only one part of the brain's language network, not the whole thing.
[02:30.97]Olessia Jouravlev is a brain scientist at Carleton University in Canada. 
[02:37.33]He also helped write the report.
[02:40.57]He said that the brain's neural processes were more efficient, or effective, when the polyglots heard their native language.
[02:50.76]"Therefore, the language network in the brain does not activate as much when they do native versus non-native language processing," Jouravlev said.
[03:03.07]The brain's language network involves a few areas in its frontal and temporal lobes.
[03:09.18]Saima Malik-Moraleda is a doctoral student at the Harvard/MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology. 
[03:19.70]She was one of the lead writers of the study.
[03:23.94]She said the findings suggest that the way the brain finds, or extracts, meaning in language governs the brain's response to language.
[03:34.90]"The more meaning you can extract from the language input you are receiving, the greater the response in language regions - except for the native language," she said.
[03:47.09]Of the 34 polyglots who took part in the study, 20 were men and 14 were women. 
[03:54.11]They were between 19 and 71 years old. Twenty-one were native English speakers. 
[04:02.11]The rest were native speakers of French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, and Mandarin Chinese.
[04:12.18]Researchers monitored the polyglots' brain activity as they listened to recordings in eight languages. 
[04:19.50]One was their native language. 
[04:21.96]Three were languages they spoke well, somewhat well or somewhat.
[04:27.03]The other four were languages they did not know.
[04:29.66]Half heard recordings of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
[04:34.83]The other half heard recordings of stories from the Christian religious book the Bible.
[04:39.64]Fedorenko noted that a lot of work in language research has been centered on individuals with linguistic difficulties.
[04:48.86]But she said there is a lot that researchers can learn about the language process by studying so-called language "experts," too. 
[04:57.54]That includes polyglots, Fedorenko added.
[05:01.63]I'm Jill Robbins.