ArticleeLife2025
Auditory cortex anatomy reflects multilingual phonological experience.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Brain-structural differences underlying dialect competence in the bilingual network.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Intergenerational transmission of the structure of the auditory cortex and reading skills.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Event-Related Brain Potentials and Frequency-Following Response to Syllables in Newborns and Adults.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Language aptitude is related to the anatomy of the transverse temporal gyri.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Musical Sophistication and Multilingualism: Effects on Arcuate Fasciculus Characteristics.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Unraveling individual differences in learning potential: A dynamic framework for the case of reading development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study examines whether auditory cortex anatomy reflects multilingual experience, specifically individuals' phonological repertoire. Using data from over 200 participants exposed to 1-7 languages across 36 languages, we analyzed the role of language experience and typological distances between languages they spoke in shaping neural signatures of multilingualism. Our findings reveal a negative relationship between the thickness of the left and right second transverse temporal gyrus (TTG) and participants' degree of multilingualism. Models incorporating phoneme-level information in the language experience index explained the most variance in TTG thickness, suggesting that a more extensive and more phonologically diverse language experience is associated with thinner cortices in the second TTG. This pattern, consistent across two datasets, supports the idea of experience-driven pruning and neural efficiency. Our findings indicate that experience with typologically distant languages appear to impact the brain differently than those with similar languages. Moreover, they suggest that early auditory regions seem to represent phoneme-level cross-linguistic information, contrary to the most established models of language processing in the brain, which suggest that phonological processing happens in more lateral posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS).
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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.