The Polyglot Brain

[Irena]

@Picaboo

You criticized this part: "This trend held even when participants were fluent in their other familiar languages, suggesting less brain power is needed to process languages learned early in life."

As far as I can tell, this wasn't the main point of the study. The main point was to compare how the brain reacts to well-learned languages vs. less well-learned ones (vs. unknown ones). That's why they studied polyglots rather than bilinguals.

To properly study native vs. later-learned languages, you don't need polyglots. You just need bilinguals. Bilinguals are as common as dirt, and you can control for just about anything you can think of. Polyglots (defined in the article as people who speak more than five languages) are orders of magnitude less common. So, it's hard to control even for very obvious things.