A study has shown that even if a person learns more than one language in his career but the mother tongue is the same, his brain shows a special response when he hears words from the mother tongue. Scientists have conducted experiments on the brains of people who know more than one language. An attempt was made to gain information about how languages develop in the brain.
Through this process, called functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists tried to understand the brain response of multilingual people. For this, written material in different languages was read. 34 people were selected for this study, of which 20 were men and 14 were women. Whose age was between 19 to 71 years.
The mother tongue of 21 of the study participants was English, while the rest were French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, and Mandarin. Scientists compared the two groups. In which one group was knowledgeable in more languages. Whereas the second class knew relatively few languages. Scientists observed that the cerebral cortex, a part of the brain, becomes active while understanding different languages.
According to Evelina Federenko, associated with the research, listening to a language you know well since childhood activates a certain part of the brain. You can know the meaning of all the words on the basis of memory only. Sentences are formed from words and the meaning of complex sentences can be understood. The cortex responded differently when the two participants were presented with their native language compared to the other language.
Part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, was not particularly active. Multilingual people have an aptitude for the mother tongue, so understanding a language does not require activating the entire brain. Multilingual people have a special status in their mind for their mother tongue. The result of this discovery by Evelina Federko, who works as a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been published in the Cerebral Cortex Journal.