Every language builds meaning using a different set of tricks. The brain physically rewires itself accordingly, new research suggests.
“The specific difficulties [of each language] leave distinct traces in the brain,” says neuroscientist Alfred Anwander of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. “So we are not the same if we learn to speak one language, or if we learn another.”
Every human language expresses itself using a different set of tricks. Some use rich systems of suffixes and prefixes to build enormous, dense words. Others change how words sound or how they are arranged within phrases to create meaning. Our brains process these tricks in a constellation of brain regions connected by white matter. This tissue routes long, cablelike nerve cells from one part of the brain to another and speeds up communication between them.
Different parts of the brain’s language circuit have different jobs. But while the large-scale structure of this circuit is universal, every language has “its own difficulties,” which might result in different white matter networks, Anwander says. He and his team recruited 94 healthy volunteers who spoke one of two unrelated native languages — German or Levantine Arabic — for structural MRI brain scans. The Arabic speakers had arrived recently in Germany as refugees and didn’t yet speak German. They tended to have stronger connections across their left and right hemispheres, the scans revealed, whereas the German speakers had a denser network of connections within the left hemisphere.
Comparing MRI scans of nearly 100 people, scientists found that the brains of German native speakers had stronger white matter networks within the left hemisphere. The brains of Arabic native speakers had denser networks bridging the two hemispheres. Each sphere represents a different part of the language circuit, with its size showing how central it is. Lines show connections between nodes in the language circuit that were stronger in one group of native speakers than in the other.
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