Second language stored in a different brain area

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Jbean
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Jbean » Sat Jul 29, 2017 3:48 pm

When I was a medical resident we had a patient like that. He spoke Spanish as his first language, but, when he was about six, his parents had decided that the family would speak only English. He grew up speaking English, received no education in Spanish, married an English speaker, and spoke only English at work. At seventy he had a stroke that gave him complete aphasia in English and left him only able to speak Spanish fluently, but with the grammar and vocabulary of a six year old. He was, not surprisingly, very frustrated. We had a Spanish-speaking language therapist work with him, but he was unable to learn any new Spanish or English.

ETA: typo correction
Last edited by Jbean on Sun Jul 30, 2017 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Cainntear » Sat Jul 29, 2017 5:08 pm

Jbean wrote:When I was a medical resident we had a patient like that. He spoke Spanish as his first language, but, when he was about six, his parents had decided that the family would speak only English. He group up speaking English, received no education in Spanish, married an English speaker, and spoke only English at work. At seventy he had a stroke that gave him complete aphasia in English and left him only able to speak Spanish fluently, but with the grammar and vocabulary of a six year old. He was, not surprisingly, very frustrated. We had a Spanish-speaking language therapist work with him, but he was unable to learn any new Spanish or English.

I feel very guilty about it, but I find that utterly fascinating. Am I a bad person? :?
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Kotiro » Mon Jul 31, 2017 1:30 am

My first language is English and I learnt Spanish from 18 y.o. I am now fluent or fairly close to it - the last time I was under general anaesthesia when I woke up the English the nurses were speaking to me was complete gibberish. I could neither understand nor speak English. It was fascinating! I didn't even realise they were speaking English, I was saying to them "Perdón pero hay que hablarme en un idioma que puedo entender" (I'm sorry you'll have to speak in a language I understand). After a few minutes I woke up more and suddenly could understand them and realised they'd been speaking English the whole time. Very surreal! I imagine part of my brain was still "asleep" from the anaesthesia but I could still access my Spanish.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Serpent » Mon Jul 31, 2017 2:27 am

Cristina initially understood only Russian after waking up from a surgery.
For those who don't know, she's a forum member who speaks Norwegian natively, and English+FIGS, all at a high level. At the time she had recently spent a month learning it in Russia, and passed the B1 exam at the end of her stay.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby reineke » Fri Aug 11, 2017 11:19 pm

Where Words are Stored: The Brain’s Meaning Map

"Semantic information lives all over the cortex"

"The words tend to cluster by semantic category" .
Scientific American Sept 2016

How lexis is stored and organized in our brains and implications for the MFL classroom

When we need to translate a given ‘thought’ (or ‘proposition’, as psycholinguists call it) into words, the brain fires electrical impulses which travel at very high speed through LTM’s neural pathways in search of the words that match that thought. During this process, every single word associated with that thought receives activation.

2.1 How first language words are organized in our brain

When a lexical item is stored in LTM, the brain does not place it in just any random place along our neural networks...

The foreign language mental lexicon

In a fluent foreign language learner with a sizeable vocabulary repertoire, the way words are stored in their L2 mental lexicon will be pretty much the same, except that there is another very important association, the one between an L2 word and its L1 (and L3,L4, etc.) translation(s)

So the word ‘dog’ in the brain of a speaker of Italian, French and German will be connected with the words ‘chien’ , ‘cane’, hund, etc. Consequently, when spread of activation occurs in search for the word ‘dog’ in one language, say ‘French’, all the words in the other languages will be activated too (Parallel activation theory); all languages one speaks will be activated simultaneously with different levels of activation, with the language in use being the most activated, and the weaker language(s) being the least activated... "

https://www.google.com/amp/s/gianfranco ... sroom/amp/

Brain regions that encode words, grammar, story identified

... analyzing multiple subprocesses of the brain at the same time is unprecedented in cognitive neuroscience. "But it turned out amazingly well...

Wehbe and Mitchell said the model is still inexact, but might someday be useful in studying and diagnosing reading disorders, such as dyslexia, or to track the recovery of patients whose speech was impacted by a stroke. It also might be used by educators to identify what might be giving a student trouble when learning a foreign language...

"If I'm having trouble learning a new language, I may have a hard time figuring out exactly what I don't get," Mitchell said. "When I can't understand a sentence, I can't articulate what it is I don't understand. But a brain scan might show that the region of my brain responsible for grammar isn't activating properly, or perhaps instead I'm not understanding the individual words."

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere have used fMRI scans to identify activation patterns associated with particular words or phrases or even emotions. But these have always been tightly controlled experiments, with only one variable analyzed at a time. The experiments were unnatural, usually involving only single words or phrases, but the slow pace of fMRI -- one scan every two seconds -- made other approaches seem unfeasible."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 144239.htm

Actual study

image.png


Syntax and Structure.
Our results indicate that multiple areas in the brain represent language structure and syntax. Some of these regions are expected while others are somewhat surprising

Dissociation of Syntax and Semantics.
The question whether the semantics and syntactic properties are represented in different location has been partially answered by our results. There seems to be a large overlap in the areas in which both syntax and semantics are represented...."

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0112575

In Immersion Foreign Language Learning, Adults Attain, Retain Native Speaker Brain Pattern

" A first-of-its kind series of brain studies shows how an adult learning a foreign language can come to use the same brain mechanisms as a native speaker."

http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=62694

"We found that only implicit training led to fully native-like patterns of brain processing. In a follow-up study we tested the learners 5 months later, and found that their brain patterns became more native-like for syntactic processing, and that this held for both the explicitly and implicitly trained groups, though again only the implicit group showed full native-like brain processing (Morgan-Short et al., PLoS ONE, 2012)."

https://brainlang.georgetown.edu/secondlanguage

Brain Networks of Explicit and Implicit Learning

while both processes involve activation in a set of cortical and subcortical structures, explicit learners engage a network that uses the insula as a key mediator whereas implicit learners evoke a direct frontal-striatal network.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0042993
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ekat2.0
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby ekat2.0 » Mon Aug 21, 2017 5:55 pm

Very interesting discussion. I would like your take on this situation with myself.

My first language was Spanish.

I came to the United States and stopped using Spanish at an early age, and learned English. Although I learned English, I always lived in an area (The Southwest United States) which is very bilingual, in Spanish and English. Although I never made an effort to learn Spanish, I heard it all the time, and understand it at a basic vocabulary (remembering that I was very young, about 4 or 5 when I began to use English as a primary language, so my vocabulary would not have been very big.) Since I previously knew Spanish (grammar, basic child's vocabulary), I bet myself that it would be fairly easy to learn again. So now I am re-learning Spanish as an adult.

What part of Broca's brain would I be using; the original (Spanish) segmentation, or the second (English).

I would be interested in knowing if someone would like to give their opinion on this. :)
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby reineke » Mon Jun 11, 2018 4:17 am

Busy brain region

'Broca's area' processes both language and music at the same time

NOVEMBER 09, 2015
When you read a book and listen to music, the brain doesn’t keep these two tasks nicely separated. A new study shows there is an area in the brain which is busy with both at the same time: Broca’s area. This area has been long associated with language. That it is also involved in music processing may tell us more about what music and language share.

A research team led by Richard Kunert of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen discovered that a brain region under the left temple, which has been associated with language since the 19th century, can do more than just process language.

Using an MRI scanner, the researchers discovered that this area, known as Broca's Area, can process language and music at the same time. They also found that the two tasks can influence each other: when participants are given a particularly difficult combination of tones, it is harder for them to process the structure of a sentence.

From specialized areas to interconnected brain regions

Why would this be surprising? Many people believe that the brain is made up of specialized areas. For example, it is known that the 'visual part of the brain' is in a different spot than the 'auditory part of the brain'. The same might hold for the tricky task of understanding music or understanding language.

The new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows that looking for a 'language area of the brain' is fruitless because the brain uses some brain areas for language and at the same time also for other things, in this case music. The results suggest that the brain is made up of interconnected brain regions which, depending on the task, can be involved in more than one job at the same time.
https://www.mpg.de/9733985/language-mus ... ion?c=2249

Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca’s Area: An fMRI Study
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0141069
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tastyonions
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby tastyonions » Mon Jun 11, 2018 12:40 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Jbean wrote:When I was a medical resident we had a patient like that. He spoke Spanish as his first language, but, when he was about six, his parents had decided that the family would speak only English. He group up speaking English, received no education in Spanish, married an English speaker, and spoke only English at work. At seventy he had a stroke that gave him complete aphasia in English and left him only able to speak Spanish fluently, but with the grammar and vocabulary of a six year old. He was, not surprisingly, very frustrated. We had a Spanish-speaking language therapist work with him, but he was unable to learn any new Spanish or English.

I feel very guilty about it, but I find that utterly fascinating. Am I a bad person? :?

You might enjoy this article (French): http://passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.f ... -francais/

Excerpt:
Un article d’une équipe italienne, à paraître dans la revue Cortex...décrit le cas de JC – qui, malgré le caractère assez exceptionnel de ce qui lui est arrivé, n’a a priori pas de lien avec Jésus-Christ –, un Italien de 50 ans qui a connu de petits problèmes au cerveau dus à une anomalie du tronc basilaire, une artère située à la base du crâne et qui alimente l’encéphale. Suite à cela, JC s’est soudain mis à parler français alors que sa connaissance de cette langue n’était que superficielle et surtout très lointaine : si l’on excepte une amourette de jeunesse avec une Française, il n’avait pas eu l’occasion de s’exprimer dans la langue de Molière depuis les bancs du lycée, soit plus de trois décennies auparavant. Il n’avait pas non plus d’attachement particulier pour la culture et la cuisine françaises ajoute l’étude.

« Ni baragouin ni grommelot »

Pourtant, du jour au lendemain, JC s’est mis à parler notre langue et n’a plus voulu en démordre. Les auteurs écrivent ainsi : « Son vocabulaire français est restreint et il commet plusieurs erreurs grammaticales mais ce n’est pas du baragouin ni du grommelot et il n’insère jamais de terme italien dans ses phrases. » Et ses phrases, il les dit à tout le monde : à sa famille éberluée, aux chercheurs, aux autres malades de l’hôpital où il est admis, et même à la commission chargée de statuer sur son cas et sa pension… Le plus curieux est qu’il ne s’énerve pas si personne ne le comprend. Même s’il n’écrit qu’en italien, même si les tests qu’il a passés ont montré qu’il maîtrisait toujours parfaitement sa langue natale, dès qu’il ouvre la bouche c’est du français qui en sort. Malgré ses maladresses et ses erreurs, JC s’exprime de manière fluide et rapide avec toutefois, notent les auteurs, une intonation de cinéma, suggérant par là que l’homme, sans en avoir forcément conscience, joue une sorte de rôle, celui du Français tel qu’on le voit dans les films…
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