The Dartmouth research team. Left to right: Dr. Ioulia Kovelman (Post-doc), Dr. Mark Shalinsky (Post-doc), Professor Laura Ann Petitto (Scientific Director) Seated: Dr. Melody Berens (Post-doc)

There has long been a debate in the scientific community on the effect that learning and using a second language has on the brain, as many have wondered whether the brains of bilingual people are different from monolinguals, as well as if bilingualism could possibly have a negative neural effect on young children. Until recently, the proper technology did not exist to properly map and study certain areas of the brain with precise clarity. But thanks to breakthroughs in near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), researchers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, have discovered areas of the brain that indicate bilingualism. Their findings show that the human brain's language centers are enhanced in a bilingual individual as compared to a monolingual individual.

The authors of the study included Mark Shalinsky, former postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth, now at Harvard Massachusetts General Hospital; Ioulia Kovelman, formerly a Dartmouth graduate student and currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT; Melody Berens, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth; and Laura-Ann Petitto, the study's senior scientific director, and professor and chair of the Department of Education at Dartmouth. The study was funded by grants to Petitto from the National Institutes of Health and the Dana Foundation. They utilized NIRS techniques with a Hitachi ETG-4000 NIRS system to delve into the higher cognitive capacities of the human brain, hoping to uncover the brain's functional differences between bilingual and monolingual subjects by measuring changes in the brain's oxygen levels while the subjects were tested on their language and cognitive skills. The subjects of the study consisted of 20 people ages 18 to 30, split up into 10 monolingual and 10 bilingual groups.

Dr. Melody Berens hooked up to the Hitachi ETG-4000 NIRS system.

What the research team discovered was that when the bilingual subjects were using each of their two languages concurrently and quickly moving between them, both the left and right hemispheres of the brain's Broca area showed an increase in activity, especially in the right equivalent of Broca's area and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This discovery has shed light on the effect of bilingual language processing on the human brain, proposing that monolingual individuals are not taking full advantage of the brain's neural landscape for language and cognitive processing.

According to Dr. Petitto, these findings would have been virtually unattainable without the use of state-of-the-art NIRS methods. "Unlike fMRI, NIRS is quiet, small, and, crucially, NIRS tolerates movement. This last feature is especially extraordinary as it lends itself ideally to the study of language, both on the tongue in spoken languages and on the hands in signed languages," Dr. Petitto says. "Typically with fMRI the subject cannot move, making the study of human language, especially the production of the jaw movements in human language and speech, especially challenging. Additionally, both the depth of recording and the temporal resolution of the NIRS system are ideal for studying language, per se. Indeed the new Hitachi ETG 4000 NIRS system is particularly well suited to the scientific study of language."

The test subjects performed identical language processing tasks in "monolingual mode" (in Spanish, and in English) or in "bilingual mode" (simultaneously processing and quickly switching between their two languages).

The Dartmouth team believes that their research opens up new pathways for NIRS brain imaging technology by performing studies of the brain previously deemed impossible. Dr. Petitto states that fMRI inhibits brain study in infants because they cannot physically be placed in the scanner. However, with new developments in NIRS technology, it is possible to identify and track neural development in newborns over time, potentially unlocking the mysteries of the developing brain.