Are bilingual brains neurologically different from monolingual ones?
Is there any benefit to mastering more than one language?
Saima Malik-Moraleda, a PhD student in the Harvard/MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, has tried to answer these questions and in doing so has conducted significant research on how the human brain responds to languages.
Malik-Moraleda herself grew up in two multilingual cultures. She speaks seven languages and is learning Arabic. Because her mother was from Spain and her father from Kashmir, she spent a lot of time in both countries. She noticed how differently people in these countries perceived bilingualism. While Catalonians preferred speaking Catalan to Spanish, people in Kashmir were generally discouraged from learning Kashmiri and would speak more commonly used languages such as Urdu or English. The fact that people in Kashmir tended to neglect their own language, and didn’t appreciate the opportunity of being able to speak two languages, was what gave Malik-Moraleda the incentive to undertake her research. The purpose of her work was to reveal features of the bilingual brain which would show people in Kashmir that there are some valuable advantages to speaking more than one language.
Although there were already many studies on multilingualism and the activity of bilingual and multilingual brains, most of them were anatomy-based, which means that they were looking at activity in specific brain regions. Malik-Moraleda took this one step further. Together with Ev Fedorenko, Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, she went beyond the anatomy-based focus and used a localised approach to identify which network in a particular brain region was activated in the brains of bilingual people.
Their research lays the groundwork for future experiments and studies on language processing, not just for English speakers, but also for speakers of other languages that are not so widely researched.
If you are interested in the conclusions that Malik-Moraleda and Fedorenko drew from their brain activity project, you can read the full article here.
In addition, you will also find other news items and articles related to this topic on the KCI website:
Should schools make it compulsory to study at least one foreign language?
“To have another language is to possess a second soul”: multilingualism and mother tongue