Second language stored in a different brain area

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Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby yong321 » Fri Jul 28, 2017 5:24 pm

This article is interesting:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v3 ... 171a0.html
"Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages"

My short summary: The research investigates two brain areas associated with second language acquisition, Wernicke and Broca (both named after the scientists). If the second language is acquired after the person has grown up, he's going to have a new Broca's area dedicated to this new language. If he acquires the second language when young, he uses the first and only Broca's area. In both cases, the same Wernicke's area is used.

I would love to find out if more and more Broca's areas would be created if the person learns more languages. There must be a limit to that and possible interference. And how about anything special about the Broca's area that is second-language-specific? But I haven't found such research.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby emk » Fri Jul 28, 2017 6:42 pm

yong321 wrote:My short summary: The research investigates two brain areas associated with second language acquisition, Wernicke and Broca (both named after the scientists). If the second language is acquired after the person has grown up, he's going to have a new Broca's area dedicated to this new language. If he acquires the second language when young, he uses the first and only Broca's area. In both cases, the same Wernicke's area is used.

I can't find the research paper right now, but I think I remember reading that brain activation patterns for second languages tend to look more and more like first languages as you reach advanced levels. I need to try to dig that up.

(Yup, I'm still alive, just swamped with work and other stuff.)
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Cavesa » Fri Jul 28, 2017 6:50 pm

Yes, that is well known.

I can't quote you the research, but we touched the area during one of the neuroscience subjects. Yes, the second language is stored in a different brain area. Two native languages (as two languages learnt during the early childhood) are stored next to each other (or mixed,not sure, but definitely the same area), the later languages are quite far from those.

It does have various practical implications. For example, I have no problem believing in some rare cases of people speaking only one of their previous languages after a brain trauma, however is definitely not as common as film makers make it seem. Strokes are another huge chapter, where language learning can be affected, it all depends on the location and severity. But from the answers I got to my questions (since speaking more than one languages is viewed as a frivolous thing compared to most problems in stroke patients, most doctors don't care), it seems that aphasias tend to affect all the languages of the patient. But they are not often tested in several languages.

Sign languages are actually not stored that differently, and have their versions of aphasias too.

A friend of mine works in a care center for people with dementias. And they have a patient, who had learnt Czech to an excellent level after her immigration. Twenty years later, as dementia appeared and progressed, she forgot Czech completely and now understands only her native Russian, which is a problem. Noone among the staff speaks it. I haven't seen her CTs or MRI's, and I don't know about her overall state, but one of the factors may definitely be the location of the memories, not only them being much younger than the original ones. Dementias definitely hit some parts of the cortex earlier some later, depending on the type of dementia, with huge individual variability.

I would be extremely interested in reading articles about multilingual patients with neurologic diseases. I'll have a look into this when I have time.

Emk, that would be a fascinating research to read about. The activation paterns looking more similar with the progress in the language. But I doubt, based on my level of understanding neuroscience (which is just very basic), that it would be possible to "move" an already created Broca or Wernicke area. From what I was told during my classes, even languages used as primary are simply stored at a different place, the age being the deciding factor. Age is the limit, not the level.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Cainntear » Fri Jul 28, 2017 7:09 pm

yong321 wrote:This article is interesting:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v3 ... 171a0.html
"Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages"

My short summary: The research investigates two brain areas associated with second language acquisition, Wernicke and Broca (both named after the scientists). If the second language is acquired after the person has grown up, he's going to have a new Broca's area dedicated to this new language. If he acquires the second language when young, he uses the first and only Broca's area. In both cases, the same Wernicke's area is used.

I would love to find out if more and more Broca's areas would be created if the person learns more languages. There must be a limit to that and possible interference. And how about anything special about the Broca's area that is second-language-specific? But I haven't found such research.

The article doesn't talk about multiple Broca's areas (which couldn't happen, because Broca's area is a specific region of the brain) but says that native and adult-learned languages are physically separated within Broca's area.

This is an area of research where scientific concensus changes relatively frequently, and the study you link to was published in 1997, when fMRI was a lot less sophisticated (and more expensive!) than it is now. I remember a discussion on this topic on HTLAL, and someone who seemed to be a lot more informed than me said that early findings were challenged because they didn't have high enough standards for what they considered "late bilinguals". Unfortunately I'm still very busy with my dissertation and thoroughly sick of academic papers, otherwise I'd have a look at the full article (as my university has a subscription).
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby yong321 » Fri Jul 28, 2017 9:17 pm

Cainntear,
Thanks a lot for the correction. You're right that it's not multiple Broca's areas, but different locations ("centroids" in the article) within one single Broca's area. I picked a few recent articles that quote this 1997 article to read. There doesn't seem to be a rejection of the 1997 conclusion. But I'm sure there's modification or update on it. Let us know if you find anything interesting and relevant.

LesRonces,
As to the age by which to separate early from late second language study, the article says "Six subjects ('early' bilinguals) were exposed to two languages during infancy, and six subjects ('late' bilinguals) were exposed to a second language in early adulthood".

Cavesa,
Very interesting story about that Russian-Czech person.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby PeterMollenburg » Fri Jul 28, 2017 10:05 pm

Cavesa wrote:A friend of mine works in a care center for people with dementias. And they have a patient, who had learnt Czech to an excellent level after her immigration. Twenty years later, as dementia appeared and progressed, she forgot Czech completely and now understands only her native Russian, which is a problem. Noone among the staff speaks it. I haven't seen her CTs or MRI's, and I don't know about her overall state, but one of the factors may definitely be the location of the memories, not only them being much younger than the original ones. Dementias definitely hit some parts of the cortex earlier some later, depending on the type of dementia, with huge individual variability.


Yes, I've also come across this on a few occasions- Immigrants who have been in Australia for most of their lives who have developped dementia and reverted to their native language only, completely forgetting English. I've also heard that it's not just a difficulty communicating with staff, but they even have difficulty communicating with some family members who are not as proficient in the native tongue (or have no knowledge of it at all) of the person in question due to successive family members being born in Australia and not connecting with the culture.
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Whodathunkitz » Sat Jul 29, 2017 1:40 am

Someone we know of lived most of their life in England.

With dementia, she only had her native Italian and no care workers understood her.

I don't know whether her family knew enough Italian (specific dialect?), probably unlikely given the timings and circumstances.

Very sad.

I have heard that English speaking care and health workers are in demand in Germany. This is due to the large number of US and UK service (military) personnel who settled in Germany but may never have mastered German or due to dementia only have English left.

I would suspect that this might reach high levels in many countries soon, Spain for example.

Generally care jobs aren't well paid and although English speaking care staff are probably easy to recruit, Swedish or German speaking staff aren't going to be common in Spain.

Many people who retired to Spain are getting to an age where they have or will lose their husband or wife or suffer dementia and will need care.

It will be a sad but hidden problem. It's one reason to teach your kids your language and specific dialect!
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Cavesa » Sat Jul 29, 2017 11:13 am

Cainntear wrote:I would love to find out if more and more Broca's areas would be created if the person learns more languages. There must be a limit to that and possible interference. And how about anything special about the Broca's area that is second-language-specific? But I haven't found such research.

The article doesn't talk about multiple Broca's areas (which couldn't happen, because Broca's area is a specific region of the brain) but says that native and adult-learned languages are physically separated within Broca's area

This is an area of research where scientific concensus changes relatively frequently, and the study you link to was published in 1997, when fMRI was a lot less sophisticated (and more expensive!) than it is now. I remember a discussion on this topic on HTLAL, and someone who seemed to be a lot more informed than me said that early findings were challenged because they didn't have high enough standards for what they considered "late bilinguals". Unfortunately I'm still very busy with my dissertation and thoroughly sick of academic papers, otherwise I'd have a look at the full article (as my university has a subscription).[/quote]

Yes, sorry about my imprecise use of terminology. I actually have no clue about the terminology of the parts within the area dedicated to each language. And the foreign languages are stored really quite far from the natives one, from what I remember from the lecture, so I don't think they even fit in the area on the map.

The problem is, that there is not that much of such research, therefore it doesn't even make it to textbooks on a larger scale. Which is a shame, at least in the countries with strong immigrant populations. First of all, collecting the sample is a problem, and it sometimes really feels like the technical part (images) is progressing faster than samples can be collected. And either you'd need multilingual doctrors, or larger and more expensive teams treating such patients.

People speaking more languages are in general not that common, and you'd need people with comparable brain damage, for some kinds of the research. And it is simply not a scientific priority for the medical side of neuroscience (like "why are you researching such a useless thing, shouldn' you care about the person speaking at least one language?" and imagine the families' faces while asking them about their loved one's language anamnesis, after the medical, pharmacological, surgical, social, and other conventional ones). And the other part of neuroscience (those tackling it more from the side of psychology, pedagogy, etc.) may just have a bit of a problem accessing volunteer patients.

The most dramatic part of the progress in strokes and traumas happens during the first phases of treatement at the intensive care units, it is hard to imagine, how such a research could be integrated to the normal running of such a unit. And how it would be paid. And ethically, there would be a challenge with obtaining a permission from a person that has a huge difficulty with communication and is under a lot of stress, to test their progress in their non native languages too.

It would be fascinating even to test people with progressive neurodegeneration in all their languages, and more imaginable from the practical point of view, an it might make a difference even for the diagnostic in some cases (immigrants), but I cannot imagine it on a bigger scale, considering the economy of such approach, and the patients' compliance (for many, it is already very difficult both practically and psychologically, to visit a doctor due to a developping dementia. Evenwithout the doctor holding them for twice or three times the amount of tests).
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Serpent » Sat Jul 29, 2017 1:47 pm

Well, globally a lot of people speak multiple languages (though mostly they know 2-3 from childhood in this case). There are also regions where speaking multiple languages is genuinely crucial.
I wonder how related languages come into play here. Is a stroke patient from Barcelona likely to forget either Spanish or Catalan? :shock:
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Re: Second language stored in a different brain area

Postby Cainntear » Sat Jul 29, 2017 2:34 pm

Cavesa wrote:People speaking more languages are in general not that common, and you'd need people with comparable brain damage, for some kinds of the research.

The reason fMRI is such a boon in areas like this is that relying on brain damaged subjects (selective aphasia being the phenomenon that first brought the idea of there being two distinct language centres into the mainstream) restricts your sample population considerably. If you're looking at people with dementia, you're dealing with a complex pathology and your subjects are certainly not healthy in other respects. If you look at aphasia in otherwise healthy adults, you've only got a handful of subjects, so you can't control for language mastery (every subject is vital).

So fMRI is the way forward, as long as the study involves sufficient participants -- and with the number of subjects in the study in question, you can't really draw a conclusion, only present a hypothesis for later evaluation.

But fMRI took a massive hit around a year or so ago, when it was revealed that major bugs in the statistical processing of the most common fMRI units made the findings of the majority of fMRI research to date unreliable.

So while we have evidence suggesting the physical separation of languages, we have none proving it.

What would really be fascinating would be to investigate "man's languages" and "women's languages" -- the languages certain tribes teach to their young people only when they become adults. Are their fundamental differences in structures between these and languages that are typically learned in childhood? Are there features that are correct in these languages that are similar to common errors adult learners mistake in other languages?

Many linguists are fascinated by these questions, but the tribes that have this sort of language also have complex rites of passage, often involving body modification of a quite personal type. One writer discussing this talked about "penile subduction" as something not even the most curious linguist would subject themselves to just for the chance to study a language. I don't know what that means, and I don't want to know.
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