The bilinguals’ brains were sent for MRI

To master the language of Shakespeare and Moliere to perfection, and even more so the language of Shakespeare and Confucius, is a rare and enviable talent. But how do bilinguals’ brains process both languages? “Languages, by agency, are arbitrary and convenient to people. There is a name and a meaning. A voice that observes and signifies the name. (…) It is a foreign part, attached to the object and outside it.Montaigne mentions in his record Tests (1580)

A French team was interested in how these written names, regardless of subject matter, are encoded by the bilingual brain in each of the two languages. The authors analyzed reading activity in the brains of twenty-one English-French bilinguals and ten English-Chinese bilinguals. To do this, they used a precision scalpel: functional MRI at 7 Tesla from the Neurospin Center at CEA (Inserm-CNRS-Paris-Saclay University). Their work was published in the journal on April 5 Scientific advances.

“Reading is a two-step processProfessor Laurent Cohen, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute in Paris (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, AP-HP), who coordinated the study with Stanislaus Dehaine, director of Neurospin and professor at the College of France, explains. First, the brain’s visual system recognizes letters and their order. Second, this data is sent to the language system, which allows access to the meaning and sounds of the words read. »

Left temporal lobe

The researchers investigated the first phase taking place in “Part of the visual form of letters and words”, A small area located in the left temporal lobe. “No bigger than a fingernail”Laurent Cohen explains this After the written word is presented, the region activates for 150 to 200 milliseconds. In the event of a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) located in this position, the patient loses his ability to read because he can no longer recognize letters. Could this area have better expertise in recognizing letters and letter sequences in different languages, the authors wondered?

Lying in the tunnel of a high-resolution MRI machine, participants view a series of images on a screen. At the same time, within this popular region, the researchers examined smaller subregions activated by these visual stimuli. Occasionally, participants were required to press a button when they saw the star appear to keep their attention awake.

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