Looking for "lost" language in the brain

A baby's mother tongue leaves neural patterns in the brain, even after a complete cessation of speaking the mother tongue - such as being adopted across borders - for years According to a paper published in PNAS, Canadian scientists used MRI to scan 48 girls aged 9 to 17 They are divided into three groups: the first group, born in a French speaking family, can only speak French; the second group, born in China but adopted by a French speaking family, can only speak French and have forgotten Chinese; the third group can speak French and Chinese fluently The researchers scanned the brains of these girls when they listened to the same Chinese recording After analysis, they were surprised to find that the brain activity patterns of adopted Chinese girls who could not speak Chinese matched those of girls who could still speak Chinese The results show that the language expression established by the brain in early childhood may persist without the ability to speak such language Original search: Lara J Pierce, Denise Klein, Jen Kai Chen, Audrey delcenerie, and Fred genese Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language PNAs, November 17, 2014; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1409411111