Single Neural Grammar Engine Drives All Languages, New MEG Study Shows

Researchers at New York University have uncovered evidence that the brain relies on a single grammatical mechanism to handle multiple languages, rather than maintaining distinct rule‑sets for each tongue.

Using magnetoencephalography, the team recorded millisecond‑level neural activity from participants who were fluent in both English and Spanish. Subjects were presented with singular nouns such as “boat” or “barco” and asked to produce their plural forms, allowing the investigators to compare brain responses across languages.

In addition to familiar words, the experiment included cognates—terms that share meaning and form across languages—and invented “pseudowords” like “paple,” to test whether the same neural circuitry governs grammar when encountering entirely novel lexical items.

The results revealed overlapping activation patterns for English and Spanish grammar, and the identical circuitry was recruited for the artificial pseudowords. This suggests that the brain implements a reusable computational template for grammar, rather than operating separate, language‑specific rulebooks.

“Our findings provide some of the clearest neural evidence to date that grammatical computations are shared across languages in bilingual speakers,” said Esti Blanco‑Elorrieta, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and senior author of the study published in JNeurosci. “Because the brain appears to use a common neural system across languages, our findings offer new insight into how we communicate and learn new languages.”

Blanco‑Elorrieta and doctoral candidate Xuanyi Jessica Chen, the paper’s first author, note that previous work had identified broad neural commonalities among speakers of different languages, but this investigation clarifies how grammar is constructed in bilingual minds.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.