The experiment involved 49 girls aged between nine and 17 in the Montreal area. The girls fell into three groups: monolingual French speakers with no exposure to Chinese, girls bilingual in French and Chinese, and the Chinese adoptees. All groups were asked to listen to “pseudo words” that used the tones prevalent in Chinese languages. MRI scans revealed that the adoptees showed the same brain activity as native speakers, despite no longer being able to understand and speak anything in the language.

Fred Genesse, professor emeritus at the psychology department at McGill University and co-author of the report, highlighted the significance of the MRI results. He said: “In most people when you process language your left hemisphere is involved. When the monolinguals are listening to these pseudo words, they’re not processing them as language. For them it just sounds like a jumble of sounds. When you look at the two other groups, the areas of the brain they are activating are in the left hemisphere, so they are treating these pseudo words as linguistic units, as words.”