Forgetting Your First Language

According to research from McGill university, it may be impossible to truly forget your mother tongue. By scanning the brains of Canadian girls with different language backgrounds, the research team compared the different ways each girl responded to hearing Chinese. Their results showed a striking response among those girls who had learnt Chinese as a first language, but essentially forgotten how to speak it.

The team scanned the brains of three different groups; girls who had only ever learnt French, girls who had learnt Chinese as a first language, but now only spoke French, and girls who were bilingual French and Chinese speakers. Upon mapping the neural activity of the girls in each group, the team was able to come up with a composite brain image to illustrate the neural responses of each group. These brain-images showed significantly similar responses between the girls who had reported forgetting Chinese, and those who were fluent in it.

The similarities between these two groups, and the lack of similarity with the neural activity of unilingual French speakers, who had never learnt Chinese, suggests that the learning of your first language influences your neural development in a significant and potentially permanent way. The patterns of neural activity associated with language learning in your first months may persist throughout life, long after you ‘forget’ your mother tongue.