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https://unbabel.com/blog/brain-language-learning/

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Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it best:

We’re lazy, we don’t get out of our comfort zones, we stop learning new things. The fact is that whatever you do, from activities to relationships to thoughts, ultimately enters the brain and affects it. But we can harness that property of the brain for our own benefit.

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The process of learning something has an effect on the brain similar to the one exercizing has on the muscles. If we make them move, they increase in size and become stronger. The same thing happens to the brain. By putting it to work, we’re making it alter its structure, while at the same time improving certain functions. Because language learning is such a complex process, the brain regions involved in it are enhanced. This is reflected in an increase of white and gray matter (that contains most of the brain’s neurons and synapses) in said regions.

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The professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University Dr. Ping Li explains that full knowledge of a language includes remembering the words (lexicon), learning its sound system (phonology), acquiring the writing system (orthography), getting familiar with the grammar (syntax) and picking up the subtle ways to express oneself (pragmatics). These distinct linguistic elements require the brain to activate different parts, including the frontal and parietal cortical regions, the frontal and temporal regions, the occipital and temporal-parietal regions and the frontal and subcortical regions. Also involved in the process is the corpus callosum, a white matter pathway that connects the left and the right hemispheres, enabling the transfer and integration of information between them.

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It has long been established that humans’ capacity to use their native language is stored in the left hemisphere of the brain in over 90% of the normal population. The main parts of the brain involved in language processes are the Broca’s area, located in the left frontal lobe, which is responsible for speech production and articulation, and the Wernicke’s area, in the left temporal lobe, associated with language development and comprehension.

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 What about this process makes such a big impact on our brain development?

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 What about this process makes such a big impact on our brain development?

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Learning a second language makes us smarter. But the benefits don’t stop here.