Brain's singular way with language.

Good day. Bonjour. Buenos dias.

Whether you use one language or several to express such sentiments, it may not make much difference to your brain.

A single network of brain regions apparently allows people to speak both their native language and a second language, a new brain scan investigation finds. If confirmed in further studies, the results indicate that a core brain system underwrites the capacity to speak any number of languages.

"We find no evidence. . . that a language learned later in life is represented [in the brain] differently from the native language," a team of neuroscientists concludes in the March 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Denise Klein and her colleagues at McGill University in Montreal studied six men and six women who spoke English as their native language and had also learned to speak French fluently. Volunteers viewed a list of English words and for each entry came up with a word similar in meaning, a word that rhymed, and a translation into French. Then they cited synonyms and translations for French words.

A positron emission tomography (PET) scanner yielded color-coded brain images that highlighted areas where the rate of blood flow changed the most during each task (after the researchers had accounted for blood flow alterations while participants simply repeated words). Jumps or dips in cerebral blood flow reflect heightened or lowered brain cell activity.

On all tasks, regardless of whether English or French was used, the same parts of the brain's left side showed increased activity, Klein's team reports. These consisted of two adjacent frontal lobe sections and several sites positioned further back.

Blood flow surged in a separate brain area only during word repetition, the scientists note. Automatic responses of this type may travel along a different neural pathway than more complex verbal feats, such as retrieving a word's meaning.