MIT research finds the brain's language-processing network also responds to artificial languages such as Esperanto and languages made for TV, such as Klingon on "Star Trek" and High Valyrian and Dothraki on "Game of Thrones."
Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient. A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as "Star Trek" and "Game of Thrones." To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language. "We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express," says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study. The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it's not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers. "It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like," says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Convening the conlang community Unlike natural languages, which evolve within…