August 7, 2007 VITAL SIGNS Learning: In Tiny Part of the Brain, a Key to Foreign Tongues By ERIC NAGOURNEY Just

cant manage to nail down the subjunctive tense in French or the difference between the Spanish verbs for to be? Blame your Heschls gyrus or at least your left one, anyway. That is a tiny part of the brain that appears to play an important role in how well adults can learn another language, a new study finds. Writing online in the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers said people who had a larger left Heschls gyrus seemed to have an easier time picking up foreign languages. As a practical matter, a beefier H.G., as it is known, may not really help with the subjunctive or the difference between ser and estar in Spanish. For this study, the researchers, led by Dr. Patrick C. M. Wong of Northwestern, were focusing on the ability to discern pitch, a key element of tonal languages, not vocabulary. In tonal languages like Chinese, which are spoken by most of the worlds population, the same word can have different meanings, depending on how it is inflected. For this study, the researchers made up 18 words in their own tonal language six sounds with three intonations each and tried to teach them to 17 volunteers. The students, ages 18 to 26, were English speakers who had never studied tonal languages. The students with the smallest Heschls gyri, especially in terms of gray matter, were the least successful, the study said. In previous research, Dr. Wong and his colleagues found that musicians also did better at learning tonal languages.