A few months back I consulted an ear specialist to find out whether there was anything to be done about my chronic deafness. Well not really deafness, just my inability to hear what people are saying against a noisy background: in a car, at a restaurant, etc.
To my mixed disappointment and relief (these hearing aids are exorbitantly expensive), the specialist confirmed what I had already been told a few years earlier, namely that modern technology was powerless to do anything about my particular case. Be that as it may, what interests me here is something else the specialist told me in passing. She said that a different part of the brain is solicited depending on whether you are using your mother tongue or the acquired language. To illustrate this point, she mentioned the case of people who, following a stroke, could no longer speak their own language but who could continue to function in the language they had learnt. Interesting!
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