A new neuroimaging study peered inside the minds of polyglots—someone who speaks more than five languages—to reveal how their brains respond to both familiar and unfamiliar languages.
Most people will learn one or two languages in their lives. But Vaughn Smith, a 47-year-old carpet cleaner from Washington, D.C., speaks 24. Smith is a hyperpolyglot—a rare individual who speaks more than 10 languages.
Scientists have largely ignored what’s going on inside the brains of polyglots—people who speak more than five languages—says Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led the new study. “There’s oodles of work on individuals whose language systems are not functioning properly,” she says, but almost none on people with advanced language skills.
Inside the fMRI machine, the polyglots listened to a series of 16-second-long recordings in one of eight different languages. Each recording was selected from a random chunk of the Bible or, which they or other groups had previously translated into 25 and 46 languages, respectively. The eight languages included each participant’s native language, three others they learned later in life, and four unfamiliar languages.
Brain activity particularly revved up when participants heard unfamiliar languages that were closely related to ones they knew well. This might have happened as brain areas worked overtime to puzzle out the meanings based on similarities between the languages.their language networks were actually quieter than when they heard other familiar languages
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