Study finds Chinese changes the brain of even non-native Chinese speakers
Dr. Jenny Crinion of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London and a team of colleagues sought to identify regional structural differences in the brains of native speakers of a tonal language (Chinese) compared to nontonal (European) language speakers. The team compared structural brain images in three groups of participants: 31 who were native Chinese speakers; 7 who were native English speakers who had learnt Chinese in adulthood; and 21 European multilinguals who did not speak Chinese.
The results identified two brain regions in the vicinity of the right anterior temporal lobe and the left insula where speakers of Chinese had significantly greater gray and white matter density compared with those who did not speak Chinese. Importantly, the effects were found in both native Chinese speakers and European subjects who learnt Chinese as a non-native language, illustrating that they were language related and not ethnicity effects.
