Languages use different parts of brain
Different areas are active depending on grammar
The part of the brain that’s used to decode a sentence depends on the grammatical structure of the language it’s communicated in, a new study suggests.
Brain images showed that subtly different neural regions were activated when speakers of American Sign Language saw sentences that used two different kinds of grammar. The study, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests neural structures that evolved for other cognitive tasks, like memory and analysis, may help humans flexibly use a variety of languages.