“The phenomenon is known as ambient linguistic diversity, and we show—using EEG-measured brain activity—that it has the impact of increasing monolingual brain activity similar to what we see in bilinguals, even if the person doesn’t speak or understand a second language,” says coauthor Judith Kroll, a professor of language science at the University of California, Irvine.

For the full story, please visit https://curiosity.com/topics/hearing-languages-you-dont-understand-may-still-provide-some-benefits-of-bilingualism-curiosity/.

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