Looking at hidden language in our minds

Linda Krahula Doleží is an assistant professor at the Language Centre at the Masaryk University in Brno. She did her PhD on Czech syntax and currently teaches English and Czech as a foreign language. Her curiosity about “lost” or “hidden languages,” fuelled by her work teaching Czech to refugees and by her own personal situation, motivated her to enter the world of imaging.  Determined to understand what happens in the brain when someone is exposed to a language they once knew but no longer remember, she asked the Advanced Light & Medical Imaging Node in Brno to help her “see” inside the brain. Her study used functional MRI to evaluate neural network activity in language-related regions of the brain and provides interesting insights into a long debated neurolinguistic question.

The question of whether languages can be totally forgotten even when fully or partially (incompletely) acquired has been intriguing scholars for some time. Interesting but contradictory results come from neuroimaging studies focusing on first languages acquired in early childhood (mother tongues) lost after adoption and moving into another country. Some of the studies show the evidence for the lost language not being lost but only hidden and getting active when stimulated in the appropriate way (Pierce et al., 2014). Other studies came up with opposite results: once the language is lost, it is lost (Pallier et al., 2003) and is no longer part of our mind and cognition.

I needed neuroscientists and technicians to help me since I have no background in imaging. The team from CEITEC was very interested in my project & they were very helpful."

• - Linda Krahula Doleží, Masaryk University

Imaging to look inside the mind

“I really became interested in this question when I started working with refugees,” explains Linda. “I wanted to see what was happening in the children’s minds, when they were acquiring Czech as a second language. It also comes from my own personal experience. As a small child, I lived abroad, but now I can no longer speak the language I learned. I wonder, is it possible to really “lose” a language? What if we could re-activate the hidden languages in our minds?”

Linda turned to neuroscience and neuroimaging, to help her answer her question. She consulted colleagues at the Multimodal and Functional Imaging Laboratory at CEITEC, part of Euro-BioImaging’s Advanced Light & Medical Imaging Node, to help build an experiment.  

“I needed neuroscientists and technicians to help me since I have no background in imaging. The team from CEITEC was very interested in my project, and they were very helpful. We started with some case studies. Our preliminary results were promising so I looked for funding via Euro-BioImaging/Czech BioImaging, and my project was accepted.”

A challenging project

The grant money made Linda’s project possible, but it didn’t make it easy. “The first challenge was to build a cohort,” explains Linda. Linda did all of the outreach herself, even speaking about her study on the local radio. She also recruited people from abroad. Then came COVID-19 and the lockdown. 

“I managed to recruit seventeen individuals to participate in the interview phase of my project,” explains Linda. After lengthy interviews, Linda determined that only five of her original participants qualified to participate in the study. And due to the lockdowns across Europe, only three of the people came to Brno to participate in her study outside of the control group.

“The interview process was an introduction to the world of research,” Linda explains. “I wanted to work individually with each participant. It became very personal, people shared their stories, their theories, and their language laws. It was a very intense but beautiful experience. I loved the possibility to pay attention to smaller languages such as Czech and to its interaction with other languages including Ukrainian, Italian and Tatar.”

Close collaboration with imaging staff

Without a formal background in neuroscience or neurolinguistics, Linda worked closely with the Node to develop and interpret her experiment. Linda brought the study participants to CEITEC, and in collaboration with a Node staff member, she explained the protocol and different tasks to the participants. “It was very collaborative. The staff were very helpful and always explained what they were doing and why,” explains Linda. “The same was true for the data analysis phase.”

While working with imaging technologies was a novel experience for Linda, she confirmed she would use imaging again. “I would recommend to anyone to try imaging technologies with Euro-BioImaging.”

Due to the small cohort size, additional research would be needed to answer Linda’s questions.  “I saw some tendencies and trends, not statistically proven, that hidden languages are active in our mind. What I saw supports what is in the literature, so it’s very encouraging. But more research is necessary. We need more data. I’m convinced the fMRI approach is the right one, but  more resources are necessary to recruit a larger cohort and run a study that will generate significant results.”

An inspiring experience

We hope that Linda’s inspiring experience will serve as a pilot for a study involving a larger cohort one day. Using fMRI to better understand our brains’ language acquisition and activation could be an important step to unlock the power of hidden languages in our minds.