Finding ‘Lost’ Languages in the Brain

Study has far-reaching implications for unconscious role of infant experiences on adult development.

An infant’s mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro and McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the “lost” language remain in the brain.

“The infant brain forms representations of language sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language,” says Lara Pierce, a doctoral candidate at McGill University and first author on the paper. Her work is jointly supervised by Dr. Denise Klein at The Neuro and Dr. Fred Genesee in the Department of Psychology. The article, “Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language,” is in the November 17 edition of scientific journal Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The Neuro conducted and analyzed functional MRI scans of 48 girls between nine and 17 years old who were recruited from the Montreal area through the Department of Psychology. One group was born and raised unilingual in a French-speaking family. The second group had Chinese-speaking children adopted as infants who later became unilingual French speaking with no conscious recollection of Chinese. The third group were fluently bilingual in Chinese and French.

Scans were taken while the three groups listened to the same Chinese language sounds.

“It astounded us that the brain activation pattern of the adopted Chinese who ‘lost’ or totally discontinued the language matched the one for those who continued speaking Chinese since birth. The neural representations supporting this pattern could only have been acquired during the first months of life,” says Ms. Pierce. “This pattern completely differed from the first group of unilingual French speakers.”

This image shows 3 fMRI brain scans showing activity in monolingual, bilingual and international adoptee brains.
The study suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life – potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. Credit McGill University.

The study suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life – potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time.

The implications of this finding are far reaching, and open the door for questions relating both to the re-learning of an early acquired, but forgotten, language or skill, as well as the unconscious influence of early experiences on later developmental outcomes.

About this language research

The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, the G.W. Stairs Foundation and the Centre for Research on Brain Language and Mind.

Contact: Anita Kar – McGill University
Source: McGill University press release
Image Source: The image is adapted from the McGill University press release
Original Research: Abstract for “Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language” by Lara J. Pierce, Denise Klein, Jen-Kai Chen, Audrey Delcenserie, and Fred Genesee in PNAS. Published online November 17 2014 doi:10.1073/pnas.1409411111

Share this Psychology News
Join our Newsletter
I agree to have my personal information transferred to AWeber for Neuroscience Newsletter ( more information )
Sign up to receive our recent neuroscience headlines and summaries sent to your email once a day, totally free.
We hate spam and only use your email to contact you about newsletters. You can cancel your subscription any time.
  1. Why the assumption that altered brain scans reflect retainment of anything (let alone a supposedly dormant language). What causes this dormancy and how is it different than the effects that arise when any type of behavior is no longer in contact with social contingencies of reinforcement? When one “forgets” how to play chess, we don’t conclude that his chess playing skills are “still there” but at an unconscious level.

  2. I have a friend who would make a really interesting subject for this–born in China to Russian Jewish parents, had a Chinese amah and went to a French kindergarten in Shanghai, then moved to Japan where he was educated in Canadian schools and lived there until he was 19. He then emigrated to Israel where he now lives. He speaks English, Russian, and Hebrew and still some Japanese and can read in the first three.

Comments are closed.