Study reveals how children learn language – and recover from neural injuries
Children are pretty fascinating. From helpless babies, they quickly develop autonomy, and that includes learning a language, or even multiple languages, if they’re born into a bi- or multi -lingual household.
Another interesting thing about children that many people outside the medical world may not know is that they tend to recover from neural injuries in a more complete way than most adults. A recent study has discovered why.
It turns out that the brains of children under 10 years old don’t relegate tasks to specific hemispheres. So, when a child is processing spoken language, both of their brain hemispheres are active, as opposed to adults, whose brains relegate most language-related tasks to the left brain.
This sheds light on why children pick up languages so easily. And it also explains why a child may still retain the capacity to speak and to process language even after suffering a brain injury.
Read on to learn more about how scientists studied children and adults’ brains, and the implications of this discovery.
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