From an article by Orna Nirfeld in the local newspaper, "Haifa Times", July 2009
A new research study that was conducted by Haifa University sheds light on the way that one's first and second languages are represented in the person's brain. A unique case study that was researched by Dr. Rafiq Ibrahim from the Department of Learning Disabilities suggests that one's first and second languages are represented in different places in the brain.
"The question how different languages are represented in the human brain still isn't clear," says Dr. Ibrahim, "and even more than this, it's not clear how languages that are similar or different from one another are represented. Many studies found evidence that all languages that we acquire throughout our lives are represented in one area in the brain. In contrast to this, other studies found evidence that the second language is represented in a different part of the brain than the mother tongue."
According to Dr. Ibrahim, there are different methods for clarifying this question, but the best way to study the cerebral representation of bi-lingual people is to study the effects of those who have suffered brain damage on their native language and second language.
"It's very important to locate cases like this, since the chances of finding a person who speaks two languages at a high level and experienced brain damage that affects selectively one of the languages is not high. Even more than this, most of the evidence from this field has come from clinical observations of English and Hindu-European speakers who experienced brain damage, while very few of the studies were conducted on speakers of other languages who experienced brain damage, especially the Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, until the present case study", stresses Dr. Ibrahim.
The case that Dr. Ibrahim studied was that of a bilingual 41-year-old man who's mother tongue was Arabic and was competent in Hebrew as a second language at a high level that was close to his level of competence in Arabic. The examinee was a university graduate who as a requirement for admissions to university passed an exam of his level of Hebrew and also used Hebrew on a daily basis in his professional life. He suffered brain damage that affected his language (dysphasia) that remained also after the rehabilitation process. During the rehabilitation process, the Arabic language improved more than the Hebrew language. After the rehabilitation process, he was given language tests that examined different levels of language skills in both languages together with other cognitive tests. In most of the tests, it was clear that the damage in the Hebrew language was significantly greater than the damage in the Arabic language.
According to Dr. Ibrahim, even if selective damage in language skills doesn't serve as sufficient evidence to develop a structural model of cerebral language representation; nevertheless, the case serves as an important step in this direction especially since it is with unique languages that were not previously studied and that are very similar phonetically, morphologically, and syntactically.
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