In a new JNeurosci paper, Xuanyi Chen and Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, from New York University, explored whether Spanish–English speakers use the same or different brain mechanisms to speak each language.
The researchers used a noninvasive neuroimaging technique while participants spoke singular and plural forms of nouns in Spanish and English. The bilingual speakers used the same group of brain areas to adjust words to their grammatical context (for example, turning "boat" into "boats"). This network of brain areas was active while planning to speak even when participants applied grammar rules to completely made-up words they had never seen before.
Says Blanco-Elorrieta, "What's exciting is that we found evidence that the brain may reuse the same underlying mechanism across languages, rather than building separate systems for each one." Elaborating on potential implications from this finding, he adds, "From the perspective of language learning, if it is true that there is one universal mechanism for language then it follows that it may be easier for you to learn new languages [if you already know one language]."
