Same Parts of the Brain Control Processing of Dozens of Languages
While much is known about how the brains of English speakers process language, research has neglected people who speak other languages. The Scientist spoke with one of the authors of a study that seeks to change that. While brain-scanning techniques have enabled researchers to explore which regions are active when using language, most subjects in these studies have spoken English or one of just handful of other languages- and it's been unclear whether the finding also applied to other languages. Recently, researchers evaluated the brain activity in native speakers of 45 different languages to determine whether their language networks-specific brain regions that specialize in processing linguistic information-behaved similarly. The analysis, published Monday (July 18) in Nature Neuroscience, finds that these distinctive languages do indeed involve similar patterns of brain activity
