Organisation of language in the brain: does it matter what language you speak?

Abstract

Brain disease or injury is a terrible thing, but the fact that the same kinds of brain diseases occur the world over offers researchers the opportunity to address the question posed by the title to this review. In the research described here, we assessed the reading skills of adult neurological patients (who had been normal speakers and readers prior to the onset of their brain damage) in both England and Japan. We chose patients in the two countries with the same causes and neuroanatomical locations of brain damage. The writing systems of English and Japanese differ fundamentally in the manner in which written words represent the sounds and meanings of the words in their respective languages. If the organisation of language in a person's brain is determined by the characteristics of the language he or she has learned, it follows that there should be little or no commonality in the patterns of reading deficit across these two languages. On the other hand, if the same principles of brain organisation apply across different cultures and languages, then we should be able to predict the nature of the reading impairments from one language to another when the same part of the brain is malfunctioning. The results discussed strongly suggest that the brain's organisation of language is in fact the same no matter which language you speak.