American researchers from New York University have concluded that the brains of bilinguals use a common neural system for grammatical transformations across different languages, rather than creating a separate set of rules for each language.
The study, titled “A Shared Neural Mechanism for Abstract Grammatical Computations Across Languages in Bilinguals,” was published in the journal JNeurosci.
The study involved highly proficient bilinguals who speak both Spanish and English. The researchers monitored brain activity using magnetoencephalography, which allows for the recording of neural activity with high temporal resolution.
Participants were asked to transform words into grammatically correct forms, such as converting nouns from singular to plural—for example, “boat” to “boats” in English or “barco” to “barcos” in Spanish.
The researchers found that such grammatical operations activate the left frontal-temporal network of the brain. At the same time, the neural patterns were common to both languages, despite differences in pronunciation, spelling, and grammatical forms of the words.
A key finding of the study is that the same mechanism also worked with pseudowords—artificially created words that the participants had never encountered before. This suggests that the brain can apply grammatical rules not only to familiar words but also to new linguistic units.
The study’s authors believe that the results support the hypothesis of a universal “grammatical engine” in the brain. In other words, the bilingual brain does not maintain completely separate grammatical systems for each language but instead uses a more universal mechanism for processing grammatical transformations.
This may have practical implications for language learning and teaching. If grammatical operations do indeed rely on a common neural mechanism, knowledge of one language may aid in learning another, especially if a person is already able to quickly apply abstract grammatical rules.
At the same time, the study does not imply that all languages are processed by the brain in the same way at all levels. Differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, language proficiency, and age at which a language is learned remain important factors. The focus is specifically on the grammatical transformations of words, which, according to the authors, may be based on a common neural foundation.
This topic is also relevant for Ukraine due to widespread multilingualism, migration, children studying abroad, and the prevalence of Ukrainian-Russian, Ukrainian-Polish, Ukrainian-English, and other language combinations.
New data show that bilingualism should be viewed not as a burden on the brain, but as a complex and flexible system in which different languages can share cognitive resources.
The study was supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
