Auditory cortex anatomy reflects multilingual phonological experience

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).