Study of polyglots offers insight on brain's language processing

[Behind the Aegis]

While most people speak only one language or perhaps two, some are proficient in many. These people are called polyglots. And they are helping to provide insight into how the brain deals with language, the principal method of human communication.

In a new study involving a group of polyglots, the brain activity of the participants was monitored using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging as they listened to passages read in various languages.

With one intriguing exception, activity increased in the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in the brain's language-processing network when these polyglots - who spoke between five and 54 languages - heard languages in which they were the most proficient compared to ones of lesser or no proficiency.

"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," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and senior author of the study published on Monday in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

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[LastDemocratInSC]

1. A related article, quite interesting, from 2022.

"The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks
24 languages."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/multilingual-hyperpolyglot-brain-languages/

[cannabis_flower]

2. I'm addicted to language learning

I grew up near the Texas Gulf Coast between Houston and Corpus Christi, so I’ve grown up around Spanish and knew a little. But I wanted to be a doctor and my mom said I should take Latin but changed my mind about being a doctor. So I took 2 years of high school Latin. In college I took 2 years of Russian just to be different. And I took a semester of French but I didn’t like it.

Then I graduated from college with a degree in Mathematics and didn’t think too much about language learning. When I was about 45, I thought to myself that I didn’t have enough saved for retirement. So I looked up moving to a country that was cheap enough to live well on Social Security and started learning Spanish. I studied with a group at a restaurant with a book. Then one of the group came back from Guatemala. He had gone to Spanish language school in Guatemala. In 2008 I went to Guatemala for 2 weeks. The same year at home in Houston , I fell in love with my neighbor from Honduras.

In March of 2013, I found out about Duolingo. I started with Spanish and then studied Portuguese, Italian and French. I would say the only one I speak pretty well besides English is Spanish but I’ve spoken to Brazilians and they were surprised I could speak any Portuguese at all. I finished the Portuguese course but they keep adding to the Spanish course. I finished it once and then I blew my streak and when I came back they had added a bunch.

[DFW]

3. I am only functional in languages I use with a fair amount of regularity

They are, besides English, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Catalan and Schwyzerdütch. Things get complicated with Schwyzerdütch and Dutch, as regional differences are sometimes huge. The Netherlands has huge regional differences just in Holland, and in Belgium, the local version ("Flemish" ) is sometimes so different that people in villages 60 km apart can hardly understand each other. We have a native speaker of Afrikaans in our office in Dallas. He insists on speaking Afrikaans to me, knowing I can only answer him back in Dutch (which he understands perfectly). I can understand maybe 80% of what he says. It's the same in Switzerland. I can hold a conversation with people in Zürich and Basel. Bern is a challenge, and once you get out to Luzern, Appenzell or Uri, I'm pretty much lost. They'll understand my Zürich dialect fine, since it's mostly what you hear on Swiss TV, but they'll answer back with their own version, which bears only a slight resemblance.

I know smatterings of other languages (Tagalog, Turkish), but don't really speak them. My brain isn't that advanced, I'm afraid. I learned what I use, and never really got around to learning ones I don't.

[Lionel Mandrake]

4. As you know, I'm jealous.

You are a language genius. I'm essentially monolingual. I've tried to learn a few modern languages and a couple of ancient ones. Despite considerable effort, the only language I am good at is English (unless you consider math as "the language of science"; I'm good at math).

[DFW]

5. My brother speaks mathematics as well

He has a degree in it from Harvard. The rest is beyond my security clearance, so if he hasn‘t yet killed me, it‘s a safe assumption he hasn‘t told me.