According to a small U.S. study, bilingual people don't have to activate a new part of the brain to switch languages when absorbing information as the brain has a shared mechanism to switch between languages, allowing them to comprehend both languages simultaneously.
Researchers say this information, which comes from one of the first studies to look at the neurological mechanisms behind language processing in bilingual people, suggest that the human brain is primed to speak more than one language.
All participants had Korean as their first language and had learned English as a second language. They reported reading more often in English and having a higher reading proficiency in English than Korean, although the Korean proficiency was not far behind. Researchers found that the bilingual participants used the same neural mechanism to identify the phrases in one language as the ones that mixed the two languages.
"Their brains readily combine words from different languages together, much like when combining words from the same language," Line Pykllanen, a professor in NYU's Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology and senior author of the paper, said in the release.
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