Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Can Infants Perceive and Learn New Information from Extended Reality?Developmental science · 2026Article
- Early but discontinued exposure to a language exerts lasting effects on white matter architecture in the brain.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Functional characterization of the language network of polyglots and hyperpolyglots with precision fMRI.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Functional characterization of the language network of polyglots and hyperpolyglots with precision fMRI.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Prenatal experience with language shapes the brain.Science advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Language preference in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Irreversible specialization for speech perception in early international adoptees.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Experience-driven plasticity and the emergence of psychopathology: A mechanistic framework integrating development and the environment into the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) model.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2022Article
- Editorial: The Notion of the Native Speaker Put to the Test: Recent Research Advances.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Article
- Asymmetry of Auditory-Motor Speech Processing is Determined by Language Experience.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- First Language Attrition: What It Is, What It Isn't, and What It Can Be.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Review
- English only? Monolinguals in linguistically diverse contexts have an edge in language learning.Brain and language · 2019Article
- The sensitive period for auditory-vocal learning in the zebra finch: Consequences of limited-model availability and multiple-tutor paradigms on song imitation.Behavioural processes · 2019Review
- Exploiting Language Variation to Better Understand the Cognitive Consequences of Bilingualism.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Event Related Potential Study of Language Interaction in Bilingual Aphasia Patients.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2018Article
- First Language Attrition Induces Changes in Online Morphosyntactic Processing and Re-Analysis: An ERP Study of Number Agreement in Complex Italian Sentences.Cognitive science · 2017Article
- Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Early development of abstract language knowledge: evidence from perception-production transfer of birth-language memory.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Optimal periods during early development facilitate the formation of perceptual representations, laying the framework for future learning. A crucial question is whether such early representations are maintained in the brain over time without continued input. Using functional MRI, we show that internationally adopted (IA) children from China, exposed exclusively to French since adoption (mean age of adoption, 12.8 mo), maintained neural representations of their birth language despite functionally losing that language and having no conscious recollection of it. Their neural patterns during a Chinese lexical tone discrimination task matched those observed in Chinese/French bilinguals who have had continual exposure to Chinese since birth and differed from monolingual French speakers who had never been exposed to Chinese. They processed lexical tone as linguistically relevant, despite having no Chinese exposure for 12.6 y, on average, and no conscious recollection of that language. More specifically, IA participants recruited left superior temporal gyrus/planum temporale, matching the pattern observed in Chinese/French bilinguals. In contrast, French speakers who had never been exposed to Chinese did not recruit this region and instead activated right superior temporal gyrus. We show that neural representations are not overwritten and suggest a special status for language input obtained during the first year of development.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.