Bilingual Grammar

A recent study looked at how our brains handle the differing grammar rules between languages when we speak more than one language.

The researchers had 23 dual-fluent Spanish-English bilingual people complete a phrase-completion task that involved being shown a noun, hearing a social cue, and then having to speak a version of that noun based on a spoken cue (repeating the word as-is, or speaking the singular or pluralized version of it). The word prompts flipped between languages and varied the changes that were required to come up with the correct, final word.

While they were participating in this task, subjects’ brain activity was tracked using magnetoencephalography (MEG) at a millisecond resolution, allowing the researchers to track active neurons, which in turn allowed them to see which parts of the brain were being activated, when.