Medical Daily – Dana Dovey
“Learning your first language is easy; it’s the second one that can be tricky — for most people, at least. Why is it that some people learn foreign languages easier than others? According to a recent study , this may depend on the strength of certain brain connections. Researchers at McGill University sought to determine how learning a second language affected the brain. They recruited 15 adult English speakers to take part in a 12-week intensive program that taught French, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare their brain activity both before and after the program. The researchers were specifically interested in two areas of language processing: lexical retrieval in spontaneous speech, or how many new words a speaker uses while speaking freely, and reading speed.”(more)