MRI scans show Chinese babies adopted by French-speaking Canadian families retain ‘unconscious’ knowledge of their mother tongue

“Lost” first languages leave a permanent mark on the brain, a report this week has found. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the US, challenges the existing understanding that exposure to a language in the first year of a child’s life can be “erased” if he or she is moved to a different linguistic environment.

The study showed that Chinese children, adopted at 12 months to French-speaking families in Canada, responded to Chinese tones, despite having no conscious understanding of the language.

The experiment involved 49 girls aged between nine and 17 in the Montreal area. The girls fell into three groups: monolingual French speakers with no exposure to Chinese, girls bilingual in French and Chinese, and the Chinese adoptees. All groups were asked to listen to “pseudo words” that used the tones prevalent in Chinese languages. MRI scans revealed that the adoptees showed the same brain activity as native speakers, despite no longer being able to understand and speak anything in the language. More.

See: The Guardian

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