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Published online 17 June 1999 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news990617-6
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The bilingual brain
Finding out how the human brain stores, uses and processes one language is complicated and controversial enough: elucidating how it does these things with two or more languages is proving almost impossible.
Do bilingual speakers process words and sentences from each of their languages in the same way? Do they do so in the same way as people who only know one language? Does the human brain keep multiple mental dictionaries anatomically separate, or does it have more of a jumbled word-drawer with a highly efficient system of rifling through it?
Research reported in the May issue of Neuron sheds a little more light on these elusive issues - by addressing the question of whether a brain that knows two languages ‘stores’ them in one place or two.
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