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Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Tagalog and dozens of other spoken languages evoke the same “universal language network” in the brains of native speakers. This language processing center has been extensively studied in English speakers, but now neuroscientists have confirmed that the exact same network is activated in speakers of 45 different languages, representing 12 different language families.
“This is a very basic study, extending some of the results from English to a wide range of languages,” said senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. statement (will open in a new tab).
“We hope that now that we see that the basic properties seem to be common to all languages, we can start to wonder about the potential differences between languages and language families in how they are implemented in a language. brainand we can study phenomena that don’t really exist in the English language,” Fedorenko said. tonal language, so it can be processed by the brain a little differently.
Research published Monday (July 18) in the journal Neurology of nature (will open in a new tab), included two native speakers of each language who underwent brain scans while performing various cognitive tasks. Specifically, the team scanned the participants’ brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the flow of oxygenated substances. blood through the brain. Active brain cells require more energy and oxygen, so fMRI provides an indirect measurement of brain cell activity.
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During the fMRI scan, participants listened to excerpts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (better known as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) read in their native languages. The researchers suggested that, in theory, all listeners should use the same language network to process stories read in their native language.
Participants also listened to several recordings that, in theory, would not activate this language network. For example, they listened to recordings in which the words of a native speaker were distorted beyond recognition, and passages read by a native speaker of an unfamiliar language. In addition to completing these language tests, participants were asked to solve math problems and complete memory tasks; like rambling notes, neither math nor memory tests should activate the language network, the team suggested.
“Language areas [of the brain] are selective,” said first author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a doctoral student in the Speech and Hearing, Bioscience and Technology program at Harvard University, in a statement. “They don’t have to respond during other tasks, such as the spatial working memory task. , and that’s what we found in speakers of the 45 languages tested.”
In English speakers, brain areas that are activated during speech processing appear primarily in the left hemisphere of the brain, primarily in the frontal lobe, located behind the forehead, and in the temporal lobe, located behind the ear. By creating “maps” of the brain activity of all the subjects, the researchers found that the same areas of the brain are activated no matter what language they hear.
The team did observe small differences in brain activity among people who spoke different languages. However, the same small degree of variation is seen among native English speakers.
These results are not necessarily surprising, but they lay an important foundation for future research, the team writes in their report. “While we expected this to be the case, this demonstration is an important basis for future systematic, in-depth, and more accurate cross-linguistic comparisons,” they wrote.
Originally published on Live Science.
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