If you speak numerous languages – as most Malaysians do – you would know how little effort it takes to think and express yourself in your native tongue. Now a US study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows that our brains process our first language differently from others.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 and has to process information in their native tongue.
Hoping to understand what actually happens cognitively, Evelina Fedorenko and colleagues conducted an experiment involving 30 individuals who spoke 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 a very young age.
Each participant had to listen to passages from the Bible and “Alice in Wonderland” read in eight different languages – some of which they didn’t speak – while the researchers analysed their neural activity using an MRI scanner.
The experts found that the participants’ brains reacted differently depending on the language they listened to. Language-processing networks, located in the left cerebral hemisphere, were most engaged when they listened to languages in which they were most proficient.
Curiously, they did not engage very much when the participants heard their native language. Fedorenko hypothesised that the brain is activated to a lesser extent because your first language is the one with which you are most familiar.
“The findings suggest there is something unique about one’s native language that allows the brain to process it with minimal effort,” the researchers determined.
Additionally, they noted that a brain network known as the “multiple demand network” (MDN) is activated when listening to languages that differ from one’s mother tongue. This finding is significant, given that the MDN is involved in the performance of complex and demanding cognitive tasks.
This proves that human brains are better able to process information in a language one has mastered since childhood.
Most of the participants in this study began learning a language, other than the one they grew up with, as teens or adults. In the future, researchers plan to study the brains of people who are multilingual from childhood onwards.
In any case, multilingualism is considered a good way to maintain brain health and has been shown to delay the onset of cognitive conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.