Your native language may shape the wiring of your brain

A person's native language may shape how their brain builds connections between different hubs of information processing, a new brain scan study reveals.

The observed differences in these language network structures were related to linguistic characteristics in the native languages of the study participants: German and Arabic.

"So the difference we find there shouldn't be due to different ethnic background but really because of the language we [they] speak," Alfred Anwander(opens in new tab), a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany who led the study, told Live Science. The research was published online in February in the journal NeuroImage(opens in new tab).