A study carried out in Germany with native Germans & Arabic only speaking recently arrived refugees.
“The specific difficulties [of each language] leave distinct traces in the brain,” says neuroscientist Alfred Anwander of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. “So we are not the same if we learn to speak one language, or if we learn another.”
German on the left and Arabic on the right. Arabic itself is a complex language and also written from right to the left, which the researchers speculate might demand more communication between the hemispheres.
German, for its part, has a complex and flexible word order that allows the language to create subtle shades of meaning just by shuffling around words within a phrase. While an English speaker can’t rearrange the words woman, ball and dog in the sentence “the woman gave the dog a ball” without garbling the core meaning, it’s possible to do exactly that in German. This could explain the German speakers’ denser white matter networks within parts of the left hemisphere that parse word order.
However, still, it’s possible that the Arabic speakers’ recent arrival in Germany could have tweaked their white matter networks too, says Zhenghan Qi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not part of the study.
Although controversial, the new results hint that our mother tongues are far more than just the words we happened to grow up with — they are quite literally a part of us.
“The specific difficulties [of each language] leave distinct traces in the brain,” says neuroscientist Alfred Anwander of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. “So we are not the same if we learn to speak one language, or if we learn another.”
German on the left and Arabic on the right. Arabic itself is a complex language and also written from right to the left, which the researchers speculate might demand more communication between the hemispheres.
German, for its part, has a complex and flexible word order that allows the language to create subtle shades of meaning just by shuffling around words within a phrase. While an English speaker can’t rearrange the words woman, ball and dog in the sentence “the woman gave the dog a ball” without garbling the core meaning, it’s possible to do exactly that in German. This could explain the German speakers’ denser white matter networks within parts of the left hemisphere that parse word order.
However, still, it’s possible that the Arabic speakers’ recent arrival in Germany could have tweaked their white matter networks too, says Zhenghan Qi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not part of the study.
Although controversial, the new results hint that our mother tongues are far more than just the words we happened to grow up with — they are quite literally a part of us.
