Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are two parts of the brain that we know control speech and language comprehension respectively, but many other areas are involved as well, including the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex.
Recent research has suggested that the brains of people who are bilingual must take extra care to keep the nerve signals related to the different languages separate. They do this by adding extra myelin to insulate the neurons, and it has even been suggested that this might offer some protection from neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Read more:
- I’d like to learn a language, which is the easiest one to pick up?
- What happens in our brain when we learn languages?
- What is the record for the most languages spoken by one person?
- What was the first ever language?
Asked by: Advita Mitté, age 11, Singapore
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