How our brains cope with speaking more than one language

How our brains cope with speaking more than one language Alamy Speaking multiple languages can have some surprising effects on the brain Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar and even accents can get mixed up. "I think maybe one of the most unique things that we've seen in bilinguals when they're mixing languages is that sometimes, it seems like they inhibit the dominant language so much that they actually are slower to speak in certain contexts," she says. "Bilinguals try to make both languages about equally accessible, by inhibiting the dominant language to make mixing back and forth easier," she says. Getty Images Switching rapidly between languages is when most "language interference" can occur, affecting not just words but pronunciation and grammar Gollan's experiments also found reversed dominance in another surprising area – pronunciation. "Sometimes bilinguals will produce the right word, but with the wrong accent, which is a really interesting dissociation that tells you language control is being applied at different levels of processing," says Gollan.