'Lost Languages' Can Still Impact The Brain, Later

Could "lost languages" influence brain development? Recent findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examine how a person's mother tongue could carry crucial neural patterns that exist even if the child stops learning the language.

"The infant brain forms representations of language sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language," said lead study author Lara Pierce, a doctoral candidate at McGill University, in a news release.

For the study, researchers used functional MRI scans on 48 girls between the ages of nine and 17. All of the participants were recruited from the Montreal area through the Department of Psychology.

Researchers divided the participants into three groups, including one that was raised in a unilingual French-speaking family, another group of Chinese-speaking children adopted as infants who later became unilingual French speaking with no conscious recollection of Chinese and French. Researchers conducted brain scans of children as they listened to the same Chinese language sounds.

"It astounded us that the brain activation pattern of the adopted Chinese who 'lost' or totally discontinued the language matched the one for those who continued speaking Chinese since birth. The neural representations supporting this pattern could only have been acquired during the first months of life," Pierce concluded. "This pattern completely differed from the first group of unilingual French speakers."

Researchers noted that early acquired information is not only stored in the brain, but can unconsciously affect the development of the human brain. 

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