New research offers fresh insight into how the first language we
learn affects our experience of all the subsequent ones we come across.
Scientists in Canada have found that our original language creates certain patterns in the brain that are perhaps never lost.
The influence of this 'locking in' of the brain is still evident
even when all knowledge of the first language has disappeared from
memory. It appears to inform the way we hear the sounds and words of
subsequent languages we come into contact with during our lives, as
though our brains have become hardwired in one particular formation or
tuned to one particular language.
The team from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute looked at three groups of adolescents: those who only speak French, those who speak both French and Chinese fluently, and adopted teens who originally knew Chinese as babies but now only speak French.
MRI scans were used to monitor brain activity while French pseudo-words
were played. Interestingly, the same areas of the brain 'lit up' in the
bilingual speakers and the monolingual speakers who originally knew
Chinese.
In those who had known Chinese at a very early age but are no
longer bilingual, their brains handled words as if they still were. The
researchers think this could help us understand more about how we learn
languages and how that process changes as we get older.
"The adopted children we tested have an interesting background
because they were exposed to one language from birth, but completely
discontinued that language at a young age when they were adopted into
families who speak a different language," said one of the researchers,
Lara Pierce. "This is very interesting from a language development
perspective because it allows us to look at the influence of just that
very early period of language development on later language processing,
separately from the effects of ongoing exposure to one or more
languages."
It may help explain why learning a language as a baby is so
effortless and why it becomes much harder later in life, at least for
some of us: our brains have already been 'set' in a certain
configuration. As Pierce notes,
very young children have been shown to be incredibly adept in picking
out words that help in their language learning and dismissing other
sounds - a skill we tend to lose in later life.
The study has been published in Nature Communications.
