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 a handful of other languages—and it’s been unclear whether the findings 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.
The authors write in their study that out of the more than 7,000 languages that humans across the globe use to communicate, research has largely focused on a single language family—the Indo-European family, and in particular, English. The new work covered 45 languages from twelve language families and evaluated the brain activity of two native speakers (one ...
