How does the brain of a person who speaks two languages ​​work?

A group of scientists from different countries, led by specialists from the Higher School of Economics, found that people who speak two

languages, can almost immediately see similarities in the meaning of words belonging to these languages. The results of this study were published in Cortex. Discuss

People who speak two languages ​​at different levelscalled bilingual. At the same time, bilinguals can be “balanced” or “unbalanced” (this depends on the level of knowledge of languages ​​by a person) and “early” or “late” (this depends on the age at which a person got acquainted with a second language).

Scientists from the Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences of the National Research University Higher School of Economicstogether with colleagues, they found out whether “late” bilinguals can quickly process information about the meaning of a word if they simultaneously use a second language. For this purpose, 17 students from the National Research University Higher School of Economics – Russian native speakers completed a special task. During the experiment, the EEG of the subjects was recorded.

It turned out that their brain began to respond totask after 40-60 ms. It also turned out that in the brains of such people, words associated with the second language were correlated with words in the first language. And it was done automatically.

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