'Universal language network' identified in brain

Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Tagalog, and dozens of other spoken languages ​​cause the same “universal language network” to fire in the brains of native speakers. This language processing center has been studied extensively in English speakers, but now neuroscientists have confirmed that the same network is activated in speakers of 45 different languages ​​representing 12 different language families.

“This study is very basic, extending some of the findings from English to multiple languages,” senior author Evelina Fedorenko, a professor of neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement. statement (opens in a new tab).

“The hope is that now that we see that basic traits seem to be common across languages, we can ask about potential differences between languages ​​and language families in how they are implemented in languages. brainand we can study phenomena that don’t really exist in English,” Fedorenko said. For example, speakers of “tonal” languages, such as Mandarin, convey different meanings of words through pitch changes, or pitch; English is not a tone language, so it might processed slightly differently in the brain.

The study, published Monday (July 18) in the journal Natural Neuroscience (opens in a new tab), including two native speakers of each language, who underwent brain scans as they performed various cognitive tasks. Specifically, the team scanned the participants’ brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks oxygen flow blood through the brain. Active brain cells require more energy and oxygen, so fMRI provides an indirect measure of brain cell activity.

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During the fMRI scan, participants listened to a section of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (better known as “Alice in Wonderland”) read in their native language. In theory, all listeners should use the same language network to process stories read in their mother tongue, the researchers hypothesize.

The participants also listened to some recordings which, theoretically, would not activate this language network. For example, they listen to recordings in which native speakers’ words are distorted beyond recognition and passages read by foreign language speakers. In addition to completing these language-related tests, participants were asked to work on math problems and perform memory tasks; Like incoherent recordings, neither math nor memory tests should activate language networks, the team theorizes.

“language area” [of the brain] selective,” first author Saima Malik-Moraleda, a doctoral student in the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program at Harvard University, said in her statement. “They should not respond during other tasks, such as the spatial working memory task, and that’s what we found in this study. all the speakers of the 45 languages ​​we tested.”

In native English speakers, the areas of the brain that are active during language processing occur mostly in the left hemisphere, particularly in the frontal lobe, which is behind the forehead, and in the temporal lobe, which is behind the ear. By compiling a “map” of the brain activity of all their subjects, the researchers revealed that these same brain areas were activated regardless of the language heard.

The team did observe slight differences in brain activity among speakers of different languages. However, the same degree of variation is seen among native English speakers.

These results aren’t necessarily surprising, but they do lay an important foundation for future studies, the team wrote in their report. “While we expect this to be the case, this demonstration is an important foundation for systematic, in-depth and fine-grained cross-language comparisons in the future,” they wrote.

Originally published in Live Science.

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