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A new research with speakers of English and American Sign Language (ASL) reveals the processes that take place in our brains when passing from one language to the other.
It seems that our brain has to "start" a language before it can speak. Previous research has identified peaks of brain activity in areas associated with cognitive control (that is, anterior and pre-frontal cingulate cortex) when this change is made. However, if this activity was needed to "activate" a new language, disable a previous one or both. Today, a team of researchers has discovered the mechanisms that underlie the transition from one language to another, a conclusion that helps to better understand the nature of bilingualism.
Speak in languages
"A remarkable feature of multilingual individuals is their ability to switch quickly and accurately between their different languages," says Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, Ph.D., from New York University. candidate and the principal author of the study. "Our findings help identify what is happening in the brain in this process – in particular, what neural activity is exclusively associated with the release of a language and its engagement in a new language."
The results showed that cognitive effort is necessary especially when one releases a language – by activating a new language, by comparison, it is almost "no cost from a neurobiological point of view," says lead author Liina Pylkkänen.
The biggest obstacle in this research effort was to separate the two processes as they occur largely at the same time. For example, a bilingual Spanish-English participant would disable both Spanish and English at the same time. To work around this problem, the team recruited participants fluent in English and American Sign Language (ASL) and asked them to name the images on the screen.
Unlike other language combinations, English and ASL can be spoken simultaneously – and often they are. This dynamic gave the team the tool they needed to separate the processes of language engagement and disengagement in the brain. They could ask participants to switch from speaking in both languages to producing one to observe the process of deactivating a language. Participants could also be asked to speak only one language to speak both, which would give the team an insight into the process of transforming an "on" language.
In order to really see what was happening in the brain of the participants, the team used magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technique that maps neuronal activity by recording the magnetic fields generated by the electrical currents produced by our brain.
When bilingual English-and-ASL participants changed language, the deactivation of a language wasincreased activity in areas of cognitive control. It was virtually impossible to transform a language on "do not change language"., judging by the activation levels of the brain, the team writes. In other words, little or no cognitive effort is required to activate a second language, be it spoken language or sign language.
In fact, the team reports that when participants were asked to produce two words simultaneously (a sign and a pronounced word), their brains exhibited about the same levels of activity as when they produced a single word. More surprisingly, producing both at the same time had less activation than having to remove the dominant language (in this case English).
"All in all, these results suggest that the change of language is explained by the disengagement of the previous language compared to the commitment of a new language," explains Blanco-Elorrieta.
The document was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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