Maybe the people who left their country of origin … – lanacion.com (Argentina)

The neural patterns created by the language they heard in their first years of life remain intact in his brain.

And these patterns are maintained over time even if the person nothing has been in touch with their mother tongue, according to a study published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.”

This footprint left by the forgotten language could provide to lived this situation, such as children adopted by parents of other nationalities, learning their native language in the future.

Mandarin and French

“In the early stages of language development, children learn to distinguish regardless of what language trate- what sounds are important and meaningful,” he tells the BBC Lara Pierce, of McGill University in Canada, and author main study.

“It leaves a kind of representation in the brain, which children use to build your native language,” he adds.

What the study was to analyze is whether these representations are maintained throughout life or disappeared when the child stopped listening to their native language.

To assess this, Pierce and his team conducted a series of MRIs and 44 girls between 9 and 17, while listening to recordings in Mandarin.

• One group consisted of girls born in China, adopted by a French family before the age of three, who spoke only French .
• The second group consisted of girls who spoke fluent French and would send.
• And the third, for francophone children who did not speak or understand Mandarin.

hemispheres for language and sound

To listen to the recording, the brains of children who had been exposed to would send -the who spoke and not- showed activity in the left hemisphere, where language is processed.

girls who only spoke French, regions of the right hemisphere involved in processing the sounds were activated.

We were surprised that the pattern of brain activation of adopted Chinese girls who lost completely matched the language of girls who continued to speak Chinese from birth

This means that the brain of the latter group did not identify the Mandarin as a language, whereas this did occur in the other two groups, although one did not understand the meaning of words.

“We were surprised that the pattern of brain activation adopted Chinese girls who completely lost the language matched the girls who continued speaking Chinese from birth, “Pierce said.

” Neural representations that support this model could only have been acquired during the first months of life, “adds the researcher

Variations

To listen to the recording, the brain of girls they had been exposed to would send -the who spoke and showed that non-activity in the left hemisphere, where language ..

That included processed studying children less than six months, and these guys could also be the patterns created early.

“However, we saw that there is a relationship between age of adoption and intensity of brain response” he tells BBC Pierce.

“The more Chinese heard in its first month, more than this brain region is activated.”

“Whereupon it is possible that if the exposure to native language is very short, less than six months, the effect is less strong, “Pierce said

According to the authors. The study suggests, although not conclusively, although not speak the language, if you were exposed to it at an early age, we can re-learn it later in life more easily.

In addition, in the field of language learning theory, the study reinforces the argument of preexisting neural representations in the brain are not lost if not used, or fade with learning a new language, but simply become more difficult to access.

The next step, says Pierce, will investigate whether these neural representations affect how the brain learns a second language and analyze in detail the process of learning the forgotten language. .