The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains.
German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit, researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences in a large group of monolingual adults.
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“The specific difficulties [of each language] leave distinct traces in the brain,” says neuroscientist Alfred Anwander of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. “So we are not the same if we learn to speak one language, or if we learn another.”
Every human language expresses itself using a different set of tricks. Some use rich systems of suffixes and prefixes to build enormous, dense words. Others change how words sound or how they are arranged within phrases to create meaning. Our brains process these tricks in a constellation of brain regions connected by white matter. This tissue routes long, cablelike nerve cells from one part of the brain to another and speeds up communication between them. Wiring brain regions together this way is part of how we learn: The more often we use a connection, the more robust it becomes.
Different parts of the brain’s language circuit have different jobs. But while the large-scale structure of this circuit is universal, every language has “its own difficulties,” which might result in different white matter networks, Anwander says.
He and his team recruited 94 healthy…
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