This research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Human beings have the unique ability to learn more than one language. This ability is mediated by plastic changes in the human brain that are poorly understood.
A team of London scientists, based at University College, used whole-brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging to investigate structural brain plasticity in English and Italian bilinguals. They found that learning a second language increases grey matter density in a specific region of the brain that is linked with verbal fluency. Furthermore, the degree of change in this region is modulated by the proficiency attained and age of acquisition, with greater changes in early bilinguals who reached higher proficiency.
Following on from these results this group of scientists has decided to study a wider range of multilingual people including those who are bilingual in non-European languages, polyglots and professional translators. Further work will also look at bilingual adults whose language was affected by a stroke (aphasia) investigating how their brains and different languages recover over time. By scanning both healthy people and stroke patients, some who are highly proficient in many languages others not, it will become clearer as to which are the most effective natural mechanisms that the brain has to support speaking, listening, reading and writing in different languages. This in turn will be a significant advance towards developing new language learning techniques or new behavioural treatments for stroke patients to further enhance brain plasticity and language recovery.