Foreign Language Skills Wired In The Brain

Some adults may intrinsically be better at new languages but there’s hope for the rest of us

By Sherry Baker

By the time most Europeans turn nine years old, they’ll be learning a second language, according to Eurostat. In comparison, only 25 percent of American adults are bilingual. There’s no national foreign language requirement in the U.S. and the number of primary schools that offer language classes remains very low.

That means that if you’re American and you want to fully immerse yourself in another culture, you’re likely considering taking an intensive language course now. But how do you know whether you’ll be able to communicate after all those hours of memorization? The answer, it turns out, is probably in your head.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers from McGill University’s department of neurology and neurosurgery and The Center for Research on Brain, Language and Music, found they could predict who could quickly learn French — and who could not. According to their study, the difficulty or ease in learning a new language may come down to how our brains are wired.

There’s no reason to think you can’t learn another language at any age. And if you take on the challenge you might be strengthening connectivity in your brain to make learning eventually easier.

An fMRI traced this wiring by measuring blood flow to certain regions of the brain via signals that reveal differences in hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in blood. “When a region of the brain is working hard, it’s getting a lot of oxygen and the signals go up,” explained McGill scientist Xiaoqian Chai, PhD. “If one region of the brain is working hard and has high activity and another region has high activity too — and the signals go up and down together — that means they are interacting more and they usually belong to the same network. With the fMRI, we can look at any pairs of regions in the brain and ask if they are functionally connected or not.”

Before 15 volunteers started a 12-week-long French course, the McGill researchers scanned the brains of the participants to document functional connectivity (where neurons were actively communicating between different areas of the brain).

After completing three months of intense French lessons, the McGill research team had the volunteers speak for two minutes in French to test how fluent they had become. The researchers also tested how many French words per minute the participants could read aloud.

Those who scored the highest proficiency levels in French were the same volunteers who had the strongest functional connectivity between regions in their brain associated with language, according to their fMRIs. But there were key differences among the fast French learners.

Participants whose fMRIs had shown stronger connections between an area of the brain linked to verbal fluency (the left anterior insula/frontal operculum) and another important region of the brain’s language network (the left superior temporal gyrus) scored highest on the speaking test. However, research volunteers whose fMRIs had revealed greater functional connectivity between a brain region active in reading, the visual word form area, and a different region of the left superior temporal gyrus language area, were the best French readers.

“Probably you don’t need to do a sophisticated brain imaging to find out a person’s learning style — they could probably tell you,” said language researcher Denise Klein, PhD, associate professor in the department of neurology and neurosurgery and director of the Center for Research on Brain, Language, and Music at McGill. “Some people say they are visual and some say they are more auditory and this research feeds into that a bit.”

Understanding all our brains are not wired in the same way may help researchers figure out the most effective, individualized strategies for people to learn languages. Some people might do better with a visual presentation while others do better with an auditory one, Klein explained.

It is unknown if some people, like those who learned French easier in the McGill study, come into the world with better brain connectivity for learning languages. “One possibility is it’s innate, that some people are born with stronger connections,” said Chai. “But it is highly likely the connections are shaped by our experiences.”

Even if it’s not easy, there’s no reason to think you can’t learn another language at any age, according to Chai and Klein. And if you take on the challenge you might be strengthening connectivity in your brain to make learning eventually easier. Nobody knows for sure — but the researchers agree it seems likely.

The reason there’s hope brains can be re-wired to learn new languages more easily is due to discoveries that our brains are far more malleable than previously thought. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that scientists found out brains are plastic — meaning they can literally reorganize pathways, strengthen new connections, and even create new brain cells throughout our lives in response to experiences and our environment.

“Obviously, there are certain factors that are more optimal than others and the earlier you learn it the better,” Klein said. “But just because we speak the same language doesn’t mean that getting there was the same for everybody.”

Sherry Baker is a medical, health, and science journalist based in Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Discover, Newsweek, Psychology Today, Health, and OMNI magazine, among others.