Our Brains Harbor a Powerful 'Grammatical Engine'

Your brain may not be juggling two languages so much as running them through the same internal engine. A new study of nearly two dozen bilingual Spanish-English speakers suggests that the brain uses nearly identical neural patterns to handle grammar in both languages, even when words don't overlap in meaning or are made-up "pseudowords," reports the New York Times. While inside a magnetoencephalography scanner, participants were shown words such as "boats" or "tuna," then told (in English or Spanish) to make them singular, plural, or simply repeat them. Brain activity looked strikingly similar regardless of which language was in play, researchers report in JNeurosci.

This finding hints that the brain may store not just vocabulary, but also abstract grammatical operations that multiple languages tap into, says lead author Esti Blanco-Elorrieta of NYU, who describes that system as a single "grammatical engine," per the Times. "Human language may be built from neural computations that transcend any one language," Blanco-Elorrieta notes in a release. Questions remain about whether the pattern holds for language pairs that differ more dramatically than English and Spanish. Future studies will push into other structures, like sentence syntax, as well as into more language combinations that aren't as similar.