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is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard. Anyone who's tried to learn a new language as an adult knows how hard it can be,

and usually the ability to comprehend someone else comes before the capacity for speaking the new tongue.

When you're listening, you can kind of gloss over the details.

So you may not need to understand every single syllable,

every single word perfectly.

Cognitive neuroscientist Schipra Gurenanden of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language.

But actually speaking a new language fluently takes much more work.

Adults are not quite able to reproduce or really hear foreign sounds.

Gurananden suspected that as we learn, the relative ease of comprehension might be explained

by changes in the area of the brain that processes language.

It's been known since the 1800s that for most people the left hemisphere of the brain is essential for language.

However, in more recent times we've started to realize that it's not quite that simple.

For example, when people suffer brain injuries to the left hemisphere,

the right hemisphere can take over language

tasks. That flexibility suggests that language is not the exclusive domain of the

left hemisphere. To find out if the two sides of the brain process comprehension and

speech differently during language learning,

Gouranandan and her team scanned the brains of Spanish-speaking volunteers who

were learning either Basque or English.

...