It’s commonly thought that children growing up in bi-lingual households have a better chance of picking up the languages spoken by their parents and extended family, simply due to their constant exposure to them.

New research from the University of Washington highlights how being exposed to multiple languages helps us to identify words in another language better than when we live in a purely monolingual environment.

“This study shows that the brain is always working in the background. When you’re overhearing conversations in other languages, you pick up that information whether you know it or not,” the researchers explain.

Exposure to language

The research began in a community surrounding Pennsylvania University, which is 85% white and where just 10% speak a language other than English at home.  A group of monolingual people were recruited to explore their language development.

The researcher then moved to Southern California, and a more diverse community, where 44% of people live in households where English isn’t the primary language.

The researchers chose Finnish as the language to explore, as it was not common in either Pennsylvania or California, and the language is widely regarded as challenging to learn.  The volunteers in both communities were given a two hour introduction to Finnish, where they were taught 90 words, before being asked to distinguish between real Finnish words and made up ones.  They were tested at the end of the session, with each volunteer equipped with a headset that measured their brain activity to augment the answers they gave.

So how did the two groups perform? On the surface, both achieved a similar level of understanding (that is not much), with both struggling to infer the real words from the fake ones.  Where things become interesting however is with the brain scan data, as these show that the Californian cohort appeared able to detect the difference between the real and the made up words.

Speed of response

The researchers explain that our brain tends to respond to information at a much faster speed than our behavior reflects.  Indeed, the neurological data highlights the millisecond by millisecond processing of information, which is much faster than our subsequent behaviors.

The neurological data suggests there is indeed a benefit to ‘ambient exposure’ to other languages, with the Californian group even more notable because their Pennsylvanian peers had higher levels of both education and income, so would perhaps be considered more likely to learn languages.  That this does not appear to be the case underlines the importance of one’s environment.

“It’s exciting to be reminded that our brains are still plastic and soaking in information around us, and we can change ourselves based on the context we place ourselves in,” the researchers conclude.