When a person learns a new foreign language, the learning results are directly visible in his brain. German researchers examined brain imaging to see how intensive language learning creates new neural connections in the human brain.
Xuehu Wei and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Science and Neuroscience in Leipzig organized intensive German language courses for Syrian refugees who arrived in Germany and monitored what happened in the students’ brains during this period using resonance imaging high resolution magnetic.
There were 59 language students and the studies lasted six months. The brain image was taken three times: at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. The technique used, called tractography, made it possible to determine how the nerve pathways in the brain ran.
Wei and coauthors now write in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences that neural connections were strengthened in those areas of both cerebral hemispheres that are already known to be involved in processing linguistic information.
Reinforcement was particularly vigorous in the second half of the study period, where the focus was primarily on consolidating what was learned in the first half.
Interestingly, during language learning, the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain, shrank in subjects corpus callosumthe volume of nerve connections that pass through it.
According to the researchers, this is explained by the so-called inhibition theory, according to which the task of the corpus callosum is not only to connect the cerebral hemispheres, but also to maintain this connection free enough to preserve the independence and difference of the hemispheres . .
In this way, during intensive language learning, the left hemisphere, which is dominant in language, perhaps loosens its grip on the right hemisphere even more, so that it can deal more undisturbed with the integration of new information into its structures.
The study also found that the greater the changes observed in the brain image, the better the test subjects performed in the Goethe Institute’s language test after the studies.
The researchers hope that their study will help better understand how various other experiences and activities besides language learning change the structure of the brain.
The refugees who took part in the experiment also benefited, acquiring the language of the host country to a decidedly good level.
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2024-01-10 08:24:00
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