Bilingualism Is Identifiable in Our Brains

Yes! I wanted to know if people can actually tell whether I am bilingual or not. No, not really, but I found quite interesting an article on the web about a research using NIRS equipement to find out whether there is a way to see what part of your brain determines bilingualism.

The study revealed that there was an increase in the brain activity when the people sampled switched from one language to another. I believe this is kind of obvious because when you are speaking in two different languages, it requires double amount of work to think about what you are going to say and deciding whether you want to say it in Spanish or English or whatever language we speak. At least that is what happens to me. I am fluent in Spanish and somewhat in English (I would say I speak 80% good English,) and sometimes I made up words that do not even exist in the Spanish or English dictionary, which I find kind of funny sometimes.

The point is that scientists wanted to prove whether brains of bilingual people are different from monolinguals, and there was no significant different. In fact, they were similar. The one difference they found in their brain hunt is according to one of the researchers, “…bilinguals appear to engage more of the neural landscape available for language processing than monolinguals…” I found this study interesting because of the things that now technology can do, but I don’t think it was a huge discovery to find out whether people who speak two languages and those who speak one differ in their brain activity.