Bilingual brain activity is not the same as monolingual

2002/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Anatomia/Fisiologia

The brain of bilinguals uses a special mechanism not to hinder the other language that dominates in one language. The neurophysiologists of the German University of Otto von Guericke have reached this conclusion by analyzing a group of those who dominated Catalan and Castilian and another of those who only knew Castilian. The study, published in Nature, is based on measurements of brain activity.

In the experiment they were made to hear words from both languages while blending meaningless false words. When they heard the word in Spanish they had to press a button. The answers of those who only knew Spanish were somewhat faster, although the difference is too small to be representative. According to this, although bilinguals know the Catalan words, they abandon them before becoming aware of their meaning, for which it is enough to differentiate the melody from the words.