New Study Finds Lost First Language Still Leaves Traces in Brain

Scientists from Canada found out that adopted Chinese children raised in Canada were still able to notice Mandarin tones, leaving them to conclude that a first language, although already lost, could still leave some traces in the brain.

The team of scientists from Canada were able to monitor how the brain processes language that have been lost through brain imaging scans. It was the first time that this type of methodology was used for such a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. They found that even if the babies who were adopted from other countries may no longer remember the first language they heard during the first days of their lives, there are still some traces of it that remain in their brains.

Method used in the study

The Canadian scientists realized that the brains of the test subjects still responded to the information they received, according to Denise Klein from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University and co-author of the study. They tested 48 girls ranging in age from 9 to 17, segregated into three groups.

Participants in the study were mixed. Some were born in China and adopted when they were still infants by French families and were taught to speak French exclusively. Another group consisted of girls who were fluent in French and Chinese while the third group had girls who only speak French and were born and raised in Canada.

In the course of the study, the three groups were made to listen to sounds of the Chinese language while MRI or magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains were being taken. The participants were made to listen to different sounds such as “ma-ma” that were spoken in tones with slight variations. Participants who did not speak Mandarin only heard these words as sounds while those that knew or spoke the language knew that the meaning of the words or syllables varied depending on the tone. The word “ma” could mean either scold, horse, hemp or mother.

Response from participants

The scientists were surprised that when they heard the recordings, the brains of the girls who spoke Mandarin fluently and those of the adopted girls registered the same response pattern. The scans showed that the areas of the brain that correspond to language processing were activated despite the fact that the adopted girls did not speak or understand Mandarin.

On the other hand, the girls that only spoke French and had never been exposed to any other foreign language, showed brain activity in different areas.

In the scans, those that were fluent in Mandarin and those adopted girls who heard the language when they were born showed activity in the left and right hemispheres of the brain while those who spoke French only had activities in their brains’ right hemisphere.

Language recognition

According to McGill University scientist Lara Pierce, the lead author of the study, they were amazed at the activation pattern of the brain of the girls adopted from China who have totally lost or discontinued the language they first heard after birth. Lara Pierce added that the neural representations that support this kind of activation pattern could only be acquired during the first months of one’s life.

The results of the study showed that the linguistic information that had been stored while a person was still an infant was not overwritten, which could be beneficial to those who want to learn that particular language.

The study was not able to provide the answer as to why this happened and the scientists said that this could be the subject of future studies, which will aim to see if the traces of a lost first language could influence a person’s ability to learn other languages.

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