Bonjour, Hi!
Bilingualism has increased in Quebec and a new study shows that speaking more than one language can affect the brains efficiency and connectivity in a positive way, especially when it’s been learned early on.
“When the brain is kind of wiring itself through infancy or early child development, it’s like developing this system for language. So if you have two inputs, how the brain does this—like process these different language information—it builds this kind of brain structure or architecture that’s kind of, we could say, more optimal to handle these languages. So that versus people who were only exposed to one language, and of course you build your language system on learning that language,” said Xiaoqian Chai, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University.
“Later on, if you want to add a second language—let’s say after the age of seven, eight, or even in young adulthood—trying to learn a second language is like adding new information to this one system that’s already wired from early on. So definitely, it’s showing that different kinds of input or experience in early child development can shape how the brain is wired. That’s essentially what this is showing: after years of this happening, because the participants we tested are young adults, having this early language learning experience shapes their brain organization, and you can see it later in life. So it lasts many, many years after the learning,” she adds.
The study was conducted by the Montreal Neurological Institute Hospital – part of the McGill University Health Centre, the University of Ottawa and the University of Zaragoza in Spain. 151 participants who spoke English, French, or both, were recruited by scientists, who recorded the age of when the participants learned their second language.
“If you’re exposed to two languages since birth, your brain has this higher connectivity or higher efficiency. We zeroed in on this whole brain network and then wanted to see what part of the brain is driving it,” said Chai.
Past studies have shown the positive effects of learning a second language like health aging, attention, and recovery after a brain injury, but only focused on specific regions of the brain. This study differs as it used resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan participants, This helped to record whole-brain connectivity.
“They’re just resting and not doing anything in particular. So this kind of, with this kind of brain signal, we can look at basically how, you know, one part of the brain is interacting with the other part of the brain when someone’s resting. So we call this the intrinsic connectivity of the brain, basically, like when you’re doing nothing, how the different regions are talking to each other. So then we’re able to have this measure of intrinsic connectivity from, you know, each of these pairs of hundreds of regions. So they have a very large set of connections. And then we can calculate, you know, within these connections, how many steps it takes from one region to the other. So we can calculate the average steps to reach one place from the other. And then, averaging that, you get this global efficiency measure that basically reflects how easy it is to go from one place to the other through this intrinsic connectivity,” Chai explains.
Some agree that being bilingual is important.
“With your brain’s neurons, you use them or lose them. So when you’re bilingual, you’re constantly firing up the brain by switching between languages,” explains one woman.
“Oui, je suis bilingue; je suis capable de passer de français to English easily, like that,” said one Montrealer.
Chai encourages parents to teach their child two languages early on.
“I think our study shows that the brain is, you know, very plastic, and if you throw two languages at your brain early on, the brain can not only handle it, it actually makes it better. So don’t be afraid to, like, teach two languages or more early on. It’s a good thing,” she said.