Speak a language your whole life and its grammatical rules become ingrained. That’s why you might correctly guess that the present participle of the verb “absquatulate” is “absquatulating,” even if you are completely unfamiliar with the word.
But the rules of grammar can vary widely between languages, and neuroscientists long theorized that bilingual speakers must process different languages with separate patterns of brain activity. In a new study, however, researchers found that these patterns were more alike than had been expected.
When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language.
“It wasn’t obvious that it was going to be so shared,” said Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University and an author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal JNeurosci.
“I think this is arguably one of the first very fine-grained findings of how truly integrated two languages in the brain are.
” Early research viewed bilingualism as an “add on” or “disruption” to the processing of one’s native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study.
Subsequent studies have found that bilingual brains tend to display physical differences, such as more efficient white matter and changes to the gray matter, and to perform better on memory and concentration tasks. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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