Speaking two languages deeply affects the brain and changes how the nervous system reacts to sound, and researches have shown that learning a foreign language can strengthen brain power, but a new study suggests that the effects go further to those who begin in middle childhood.
It indicates that people who began learning a foreign language at 10 and were always exposed to the language, meaning they heard and used it in daily life, had improvements in the structure of the brain's white matter compared with people who grew up speaking only one language and did not learn a foreign language.
These "higher levels of structural integrity(完整性)" were in areas responsible for language learning and semantic(语义的)processing, which occurs when the meaning of a word is encoded and related to similar words with similar meaning.
The new findings, published in the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, studied brain scans from 200 subjects(实验者), all around the age of 30, who lived in Britain for at least 13 months. They all started learning English as a foreign language at the age of 10.
Their imaging scans were compared with people of similar age who spoke only English. The study was led by Christos of the University of Kent School of Psychology in Britain.
"Everyday dealing with more than one language benefits specific language-related brain structures by preserving their integrity, and therefore it protects them against deterioration in older age," the study found.
