Babies may not seem to know what you’re saying—but the particular language they absorb as infants leaves permanent neurological traces.
In new research carried out by scientist at Montreal, an MRI machine was used to scan the brains of older children who had been adopted from China as infants into French-speaking families and no longer understood Chinese.
Their MRI results showed a similar pattern of neural activation in response to Chinese language tones as did non adopted children in Chinese-French bilingual families.
This pattern of neural activation did not diminish with age among the adopted children, and was absent among non-adopted French monolingual children.