Our brains are dynamic organs that respond to, and are shaped by, our life experiences. Sometimes, this even results in alterations in the shape and size of their various regions.

The auditory cortex is one of the brain areas processing speech. In people who have mastered more than one tongue, it is also tasked with recognising and distinguishing between speech sounds from different languages.

Although previous research suggests that being bilingual can influence brain anatomy, these changes are still poorly understood. How different parts of the auditory cortex are structured, or how they work together has also remained unclear. Kepinska et al. therefore set out to determine if the structure of the brain's auditory cortex is shaped by language experience. To do so, they used an imaging technique known as structural MRI to take detailed pictures of the auditory cortex of over 200 people who each spoke between one and seven languages. In total, 36 different languages were represented across the entire group.

The scans showed that a specific part of the auditory cortex, called the second TTG, was thinner in people who spoke more languages. Further analysis revealed that some of this variation in TTG thickness was associated with the variety of speech sounds present in the languages that participants were familiar with: the more languages someone spoke, and the greater the sound differences between them, the thinner the second TTG. These results suggest that the auditory cortex is shaped by a process called ‘experience-driven efficiency’; in other words, the TTG needs less tissue to do its job in people who have more experience in different languages.

Going forward, Kepinska et al. hope that these findings may help refine our understanding of how the brain adapts to language exposure. This, in turn, could improve both educational interventions and clinical therapies, for example to help people with dyslexia or hearing impairments.

Processing of complex auditory stimuli is fundamental to vocal communication. In humans with typical development, auditory processing has been shown to depend on multiple regions within the temporal cortex spreading across the superior and lateral aspects of the superior temporal gyrus (STG). The superior aspect of the STG hosts tonotopically organized primary auditory regions, which have been shown to be located in regions including the first transverse temporal gyrus (TTG), i.e., Heschl’s gyrus (HG) (Dick et al., 2012; Moerel et al., 2014). The planum polare (PP) is immediately anterior to HG, while the planum temporale (PT) borders it posteriorly. Of note, TTG shows high variability in shape and size, some individuals having one single gyrus, others presenting duplications (with a common stem or fully separated) or multiplication of TTG (Geschwind and Levitsky, 1968; Marie et al., 2015). The superior temporal sulcus (STS) lies directly below the STG and separates it from the middle temporal gyrus. Understanding functional contributions of these different brain areas to processing of sound and vocal stimuli has been advanced by lesion studies (Hillis et al., 2017), ablation, and resection case studies (Hamilton et al., 2021; Hullett et al., 2022), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Booth et al., 2002; Da Costa et al., 2011; Humphries et al., 2014), and intracranial recordings (Hamilton et al., 2021; Mesgarani et al., 2014). To date, however, no single functional parcellation of the human auditory cortical areas is generally agreed upon (Hamilton et al., 2021; Moerel et al., 2014). For example, in contrast to hierarchical models of auditory processing (e.g. Binder et al., 2000; Humphries et al., 2014; Scott and Johnsrude, 2003; Wessinger et al., 2001), recent proposals of sound processing postulate that processing of speech is distributed, and happens in parallel in different regions of the auditory cortex (Hamilton et al., 2021). According to parallel processing models, the posterior STG has been shown to be a crucial and essential locus for language and phonological processing (Bhaya-Grossman and Chang, 2022; Hillis et al., 2017), and to encode acoustic-articulatory features of speech sounds (Lakretz et al., 2021; Mesgarani et al., 2014). The primary auditory regions, including HG, have been argued not to be necessary for speech perception (Hamilton et al., 2021; Hullett et al., 2022).

Structural brain imaging provides another route for gaining insight into the functional roles of cortical subregions, albeit at a different timescale. Quantifying individual differences in behavioral skill and/or experience and relating them to cortical morphology can inform us about the relative influences of experience-dependent plasticity and of potential predisposition, in different domains. Of note, distinct influences (environmental versus genetic) tend to be reflected by different underlying anatomical characteristics of the brain. Indeed, a recent large-scale genome-wide association meta-analysis suggests that cortical surface area is relatively more influenced by genetics and that cortical thickness tends to reflect environmentally driven neuroplasticity (Grasby et al., 2020). Such environmental effect on cortical thickness might in turn be tied to microstructural changes to the underlying brain tissue, such as modifications in dendritic length and branching, synaptogenesis or synaptic pruning, growth of capillaries and glia, all previously tied to some kind of environmental enrichment and/or skill learning (see Lövdén et al., 2013; Zatorre et al., 2012, for overviews). Increased cortical thickness may reflect synaptogenesis and dendritic growth, while cortical thinning observed with MRI may be a result of increased myelination (Natu et al., 2019) or synaptic pruning.

In the context of multilingualism, structural brain imaging can offer insights into whether and how the brain accommodates experience with different languages, and into what type of linguistic information is encoded, stored, and processed by particular brain structures. Previous findings point to an influence of experience-dependent plasticity on thickness of regions associated with speech processing, including the left posterior STG and left PT (Hervais-Adelman et al., 2017), as well as the STG (Mårtensson et al., 2012). Moreover, Ressel et al., 2012, associated lifelong bilingualism with increased volume of the HG, a finding interpreted as reflecting experience-related plasticity related to the acquisition of novel phonology.

Languages differ from each other in many ways and to different degrees: language similarities vary per linguistic domain, with distinct typological distances that can be computed between the languages’ phonological, lexical, and syntactic systems. The present study investigates whether there are brain structural signatures of multilingualism in the auditory cortex, and whether typological distances between spoken languages further modulate those signatures. Given our focus on auditory brain regions, we quantified how the languages spoken by the participants differed from each other in terms of their phonological systems. Specifically, we investigated whether the neuroanatomical indices describing the auditory cortex regions were related to cross-linguistic phonological information at different levels: acoustic and articulatory feature-level, phoneme-level, or (more abstract) counts of phonological classes.

To investigate the relationship between the individual variability in the morphology of the auditory cortex and variability in language experience, we analyzed the anatomical brain scans of 204 healthy, right-handed participants from the PLORAS database (Seghier et al., 2016). The sample was split into two groups according to the date of data acquisition. The main sample included 136 participants speaking between 1 and 7 languages (2.65 languages on average), and representing a relatively wide range of linguistic diversity (34 different languages in total), see Figure 1 for a visual representation of the sample’s language experience. The replication sample included 68 participants speaking to up to 5 languages, 2.44 languages on average. All MRI anatomical images were processed with FreeSurfer’s brain structural pipeline (Fischl et al., 2004). Multilingualism was operationalized in a continuous way, without artificially dichotomizing the sample into multi-, bi-, and monolinguals (DeLuca et al., 2019; Luk and Bialystok, 2013). Given the focus on auditory brain regions and on potential associations with language distance at the phonological level, and the fact that phonological perceptual space is known to be shaped relatively early in life (e.g. Werker and Hensch, 2015), we used information regarding the age of onset(s) of acquisition (AoA) of the different languages spoken by participants, and weighed each language by its AoA. For this, we operationalized the language experience in a continuous and quantitative measure for each participant, using Shannon’s, 1948 entropy equation (see Materials and methods, section ‘Language experience’), with high entropy values indicating more diverse language experience. In addition to the language experience index not accounting for typological features (‘Language experience – no typology’), three measures combining language experience with typological distances at different levels were constructed: (1) ‘Language experience – features’, (2) ‘Language experience – phonemes’, and (3) ‘Language experience – phonological classes’.

Figure 1

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Our analyses aimed at a fine localization of the structural effects of multilingualism. We predicted (see Bhaya-Grossman and Chang, 2022; Hamilton et al., 2021; Lakretz et al., 2021; Mesgarani et al., 2014) that the cortical thickness of posterior STG would be related to the composite measures of language experience in our multilingual participants, and to the differences between their languages at the acoustic and articulatory feature level. In terms of the predicted direction of these effects, according to most current views, multilingualism is hypothesized to be a dynamic process reshaping brain structure and inducing both increases (in initial stages) and decreases (in peak efficiency) in brain morphological indices as a function of quantity of the multilingual experience (Pliatsikas, 2020). Furthermore, acquisition of multiple languages is thought to have additive effects on brain structure, and to induce cortical and subcortical adaptations in order to accommodate the additional languages (see, e.g., Hervais-Adelman et al., 2018). The exact nature of such adaptations for multiple languages of phonologically diverse repertories on auditory brain regions is to date unknown. A positive relationship between the thickness of auditory regions and the degree of multilingualism (weighted by greater phonological distance) would indicate that the auditory regions need to expand in order to accommodate the variability of phonological input in the environment; a negative one would suggest a specialization of the auditory system in relation to such variability (Pliatsikas, 2020).

Table 3 provides an overview of the performed analyses and of results.

Second TTG and effects of language typology

Building on the above result, we investigated whether the thickness of participants’ second TTG was related to cross-linguistic phonological information describing the languages they spoke, above and beyond being related to mere experience of speaking several languages. The analysis below was therefore performed on a sub-sample of participants who had multiple TTGs (n =130 in the left and n = 96 in the right hemisphere). We constructed three indices of language experience accounting for different typological relations between languages (see Kepinska et al., 2023, for a similar approach applied to lexical distances): (1) ‘Language experience – features’, (2) ‘Language experience – phonemes’, and (3) ‘Language experience – phonological classes’. We used these indices as dependent variables in a set of multiple regression analyses fit to the average thickness values of the left and right second TTG, and performed a model comparison procedure to gauge which of the typological measure was most related to the thickness of the second TTG. Model comparison was performed by computing differences in explained variance (ΔR² Adjusted) compared to the baseline model (i.e. with language experience without typological information), and using the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) (Schwarz, 1978), where the difference between two BICs was converted into a Bayes factor using the below equation, following Wagenmakers, 2007:

$B{F}_{10}=exp\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }BI{C}_{01}}{2}$

The model without typological information (‘Language experience – no typology’) served as baseline for the comparisons. The analyses showed that out of the three language experience indices – (1) ‘Language experience – features’, (2) ‘Language experience – phonemes’, and (3) ‘Language experience – phonological classes’ – the model containing phoneme level information explained the most variance in the average thickness of the bilateral second TTG. It also outperformed the model containing the language experience index not accounting for any typological information (‘Language experience – no typology’), see Table 5. None of the other phonological distance measures combined with language experience performed better than language experience alone. The direction of the relationship between language experience weighted by typological distance was negative, and had a small effect size (β = – 0.35, t = – 2.96, p=0.004, f² = 0.07 and β = – 0.26, t = – 1.98, p=0.05, f² = 0.04 for left and right hemisphere, respectively), showing that the more extensive one’s language experience, and the more varied at the phoneme level one’s languages are, the thinner the second TTG cortex (see Figure 2). The statistics for the overall regression models are presented in Appendix 1 – (Second TTG and effects of language typology).

Table 5

		Left				Right
Language experience models:		No typology	Features	Phonemes	Phonological classes	No typology	Features	Phonemes	Phonological classes
(Intercept)	β	0.00	–0.01	0.00	–0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.01
	SE	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.03)	(0.04)	(0.03)	(0.03)
Language experience	β	–0.12**	–0.33	–0.35**	–0.60*	–0.10+	–0.25	–0.26+	–0.44
	SE	(0.05)	(0.23)	(0.12)	(0.29)	(0.05)	(0.27)	(0.13)	(0.33)
Age	β	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
	SE	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)
Mean thickness (left/right)	β	1.40***	1.41***	1.37***	1.41***	0.94*	0.99*	0.92*	0.99**
	SE	(0.30)	(0.31)	(0.30)	(0.30)	(0.37)	(0.38)	(0.37)	(0.37)
Sex	β	0.00	0.01	0.00	0.01	–0.01	–0.01	–0.01	0.00
	SE	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.05)
Num.Obs.		130	130	130	130	96	96	96	96
R2		0.20	0.17	0.21	0.18	0.16	0.13	0.16	0.14
R2 Adj.		0.17	0.14	0.18	0.16	0.12	0.09	0.12	0.10
AIC		18.5	23.5	16.9	21.2	11.9	14.9	11.8	14.0
BIC		35.7	40.7	34.1	38.4	27.3	30.3	27.2	29.4
Log.Lik.		–3.23	–5.75	–2.43	–4.62	0.04	–1.47	0.10	–0.99
F		7.80	6.32	8.29	6.98	4.30	3.46	4.33	3.72
RMSE		0.25	0.25	0.25	0.25	0.24	0.25	0.24	0.24
ΔR2 Adjusted		–	–0.03	0.01	–0.02	–	–0.03	0.00	–0.02
BF10		–	0.08	2.23	0.25	–	0.22	1.08	0.36

1. .p<0.1, +p = 0.05, *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001.

Figure 2

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To further establish that our results reflected the relationship between TTG structure and phonological diversity specifically (as opposed to language diversity in a more general sense), we derived an additional measure of language experience, where the AoA index of different languages was weighted by lexical distances between the languages. Here, we followed the methodology described in Kepinska et al., 2023: We used Levenshtein Distance Normalized Divided (LDND) (Wichmann et al., 2010) which was computed using the ASJP.R program by Wichmann (https://github.com/Sokiwi/InteractiveASJP01, Wichmann, 2019). Information on lexical distances was combined with language experience information per participant using Rao’s quadratic entropy equation in the same way as for the phonological measures. We then entered this language experience measure accounting for lexical distances between the languages into linear models predicting the thickness of the second left and right TTG (controlling for participants’ age, sex, and mean hemispheric thickness) and observed that the index of multilingual language experience accounting for lexical distances between languages explained less variance than the index incorporating phoneme-level distances between languages, both in the left and the right hemisphere (R²_Adj = 0.164 and R²_Adj = 0.116 for left and right, respectively). This further strengthens our conclusion that our results reflected the relationship between TTG structure and phonological diversity specifically, as opposed to language diversity in a more general sense.

To further probe how cross-linguistic sound inventories may modulate the effect of language experience on the brain, and to account for language experience in participants with different mother tongues (L1s), we constructed a cross-linguistic description of individual languages (see Materials and methods, section ‘Phonemes’) and used it to calculate a measure of cumulative phoneme inventory for each participant. Here, we counted how many unique phonemes each participant was exposed to across all their languages (i.e. phonemes that overlapped between languages were counted only once), irrespective of when these languages were acquired. We used this measure as an independent variable in another linear model fit to the average thickness values of the second TTG (controlling for age, sex, hemispheric thickness, and accounting for language experience irrespective of language typology) (see section ‘Phonemes’, Appendix 1– (Cumulative phoneme inventory and the second TTG) and Appendix 1—table 4). In the left hemisphere, this measure explained variance in the thickness of the second TTG above and beyond language experience (β = – 0.004, t = – 2.910, p=0.004), with a small effect size (f² = 0.06). In the right hemisphere, the thickness of the second TTG was not significantly related to the ‘cumulative phoneme inventory’ measure (p=0.76), when also accounting for overall language experience irrespective of typology. This result shows that the thickness of the left second TTG in these participants was related to the specific characteristics of languages at the phoneme level of their phonological inventories, irrespective of when these languages were acquired, while the thickness of the right second TTG was relatively more related to when and how many languages were learned (even though the typological distance information did improve the model fit, see Table 5), see Appendix 1—figure 6 and Appendix 1—table 4, and Appendix 1 – (Second TTG and effects of language typology).

Language experience in participants with a single TTG

So far, we revealed associations between phonological language experience and the cortical thickness of the second TTG bilaterally in multilinguals. Yet, 40 participants out of 136 (29.4%) had a single TTG (HG) in the right hemisphere (versus only 6 participants, i.e., 4.4% in the left; see Table 4). We therefore repeated the above analysis in the 40 participants with a single TTG in the right hemisphere in order to investigate the relationship between TTG anatomy and language experience in this sample. The analysis revealed that in participants without posterior TTGs in the right hemisphere, the thickness of the first TTG was indeed related to their language experience. The nature of this relation proved however to be different than that for multilingual participants with multiple TTGs. First, the language experience index accounting for most variance in the thickness of the first TTG was the index not accounting for typological relations between multilinguals’ languages (‘Language experience – no typology’), see Appendix 1—table 5. Second, the direction of this effect was inverse to that found for participants with multiple TTGs: the more extensive one’s language experience, the thicker the HG (β=0.15, t=2.89, p=0.007; medium effect size: f²=0.237), see Figure 3. Of note, we did not find any significant relationship between the thickness of the PT and language experience in this sub-group of participants (β=0.02, t=2.43, p=0.81). In addition, for PT thickness, compared to a model including only covariates of no-interest, the model including the language experience index offered moderate evidence against it (BF₁₀ = 0.16), suggesting that the observed effects between cortical thickness and language experience in the superior temporal plane are specific to gyri only, see Appendix 1—table 5 and Appendix 1 – (Language experience in participants with a single TTG).

Figure 3

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Replication analysis

In an effort to strengthen the inferences that can be made from the above results, we tested whether the relationship between multilingual language experience and thickness of the second TTG could be replicated in an independent sample of 68 participants. Note that too few participants presented single gyri in the left (n = 7) and the right hemisphere (n = 14), therefore the replication analysis focused on the second TTG results only. Using linear regression, we fit models to the average thickness values of participants’ left and right second TTG. As in the analyses on the original sample, we first fit a model using the language experience index irrespective of typology (‘Language experience – no typology’), and then we fit models that additionally accounted for the three types of typological relations between languages (features, phonemes, and counts of phonological classes), controlling for covariates of age, sex, scanner model, and mean hemispheric thickness. We again observed that language experience (‘Language experience – no typology’) did significantly predict the average thickness of the second TTG, but only in the right hemisphere (β = – 0.13, t = – 2.05, p=0.046; small effect size: f² = 0.087), see Table 6. Furthermore, similarly to the analysis on the main sample (see section ‘Second TTG and effects of language typology’), the language experience index weighted by phonological information at the phoneme level (‘Language experience – phonemes’) showed a better fit than the model without typological information, explaining 3% of additional variance in the average thickness of the right second TTG. In contrast to the results of the main sample, however, this time the model including phonological feature-level information (‘Language experience – features’) had a better fit to the thickness data and explained an additional 14% of the variance (11% more variance than the model with language experience weighted by phoneme-level distances), see Table 6 and Figure 4C. No language experience indices were significantly related to the average thickness values of second TTG in the left hemisphere (β = – 0.03, t = – 0.53, p=0.60, and β = – 0.09, t = – 0.58, p=0.57, for language experience index without and with typological phoneme-level information, respectively), see Figure 4 and Table 6.

Figure 4

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Table 6

		Left				Right
Language experience models:		No typology	Features	Phonemes	Phonological classes	No typology	Features	Phonemes	Phonological classes
(Intercept)	β	1.00	1.12	0.99	1.24	–1.85	–2.20.	–2.09	–1.21
	SE	(1.14)	(1.10)	(1.13)	(1.09)	(1.34)	(1.21)	(1.33)	(1.30)
Language Experience	β	–0.03	–0.09	–0.09	0.32	–0.13*	–1.02***	–0.38*	–0.75
	SE	(0.06)	(0.28)	(0.15)	(0.49)	(0.06)	(0.27)	(0.15)	(0.49)
Scanner	β	–0.08	–0.09	–0.08	–0.09	0.10	0.09	0.11	0.09
	SE	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.08)	(0.07)	(0.08)	(0.08)
Age	β	0.00	0.01	0.00	0.01	0.01*	0.01**	0.01*	0.01*
	SE	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)	(0.00)
Sex	β	0.09	0.09	0.09	0.07	0.00	0.03	0.01	–0.02
	SE	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.07)	(0.06)	(0.07)	(0.07)
Mean thickness (left/right)	β	0.57	0.52	0.58	0.42	1.72**	1.86***	1.81***	1.52**
	SE	(0.44)	(0.42)	(0.44)	(0.42)	(0.52)	(0.46)	(0.51)	(0.50)
Num.Obs.		61	61	61	61	54	54	54	54
R2		0.092	0.089	0.092	0.094	0.225	0.350	0.253	0.196
R2 Adj.		0.009	0.006	0.010	0.012	0.144	0.282	0.175	0.112
AIC		13.9	14.1	13.8	13.7	7.6	–1.9	5.6	9.5
BIC		28.7	28.9	28.6	28.5	21.5	12.0	19.5	23.5
Log.Lik.		0.047	–0.046	0.077	0.130	3.205	7.947	4.196	2.229
F		1.109	1.072	1.120	1.142	2.781	5.158	3.244	2.342
RMSE		0.24	0.24	0.24	0.24	0.23	0.21	0.22	0.23
ΔR2 Adjusted		–	>–0.01	<0.01	<0.01	–	0.14	0.03	–0.03
BF10		–	0.91	1.03	1.09	–	114.68	2.70	0.38

1. .p<0.1, +p = 0.05, *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001.

Multilingual language experience, quantified in a continuous manner, is related to the structure of the auditory cortex. Using two independent samples of participants, we find replicable effects showing that multilingual language experience, weighed by the age of acquisition of the respective languages, is specifically related to the thickness of gyri (TTG) of the superior temporal plane. Moreover, we show that the typological distances between multilinguals’ languages, in particular typological distance measures based on phonemes of the different languages (and to some degree on their acoustic and articulatory features), explains variation in TTG thickness above and beyond the effect of AoA alone.

The effects we find are specific to the second TTG in people having at least one full posterior duplication, and to the first TTG in people having only one gyrus. The anterior-most TTG, i.e., HG, is the first cortical relay station for auditory input. HG and the TTG as a whole exhibit large individual variation in shape and size: some individuals have a single TTG, but duplications (complete or partial) and multiplications of the gyrus are also common, and have been observed both ex vivo (Geschwind and Levitsky, 1968) and in vivo (Marie et al., 2015). The TTG are known to be formed before birth, in utero (Chi et al., 1977). Further, genes known to be involved in speech processing, in the development of the nervous system, and in X-linked deafness, have been related to the surface area and thickness of the left and right HG (Cai et al., 2014). A body of work has shown relationships between both HG volume and TTG shape (i.e. duplication patterns) and auditory and language abilities that are thought to be relatively stable and thus possibly arising from predisposition, such as speech sound processing and learning abilities (Golestani et al., 2011; Golestani et al., 2007), linguistic tone learning (Wong et al., 2008), and general language aptitude (Turker et al., 2017). Studies have also shown larger HG and more TTG duplications in professional musicians (Schneider et al., 2005), and longitudinal work in children undergoing musical training shows that the gray matter volume of this region is relatively stable over the course of a year (Seither-Preisler et al., 2014). To date, however, little evidence has been shown supporting experience-dependent plasticity of TTG. Ressel et al., 2012, showed that lifelong, non-elective bilingual language experience with Spanish and Catalan was associated with a larger bilateral HG volume in comparison to monolingual experience. Importantly, the bilinguals in their study were not self-selected, so unlikely to have learned a second language because of a special talent for languages. The findings of the Ressel et al. study thus suggested that the HG volume differences arose from experience with a different phonological system, since Spanish and Catalan are quite similar at the lexical level but have different phonologies. This finding was partially replicated in our study, in a sub-sample of participants with a single gyrus in the right hemisphere. More generally, our results show that experience with multiple languages is associated with differences in the thickness of the TTG, and that increasing degrees of multilingualism are linearly related to the structure of the TTG. Establishing that non-pathological environmental experiences are related to the morphology of TTG offers important insights into the adaptability of this early sensory region, and has important implications for our understanding of the neural underpinnings of auditory processing in general, which we outline below.

We find an effect of multilingualism on the cortical thickness of the second TTG in individuals with a second such gyrus, but on the thickness of the first gyrus in individuals without a full TTG duplication. The result aligns with recent findings of cortical surface area being relatively more associated with genetic factors and of cortical thickness being relatively more associated with environmental factors (e.g. Eyler et al., 2012; Grasby et al., 2020). Individual differences in the shape (i.e. duplication patterns) of the TTG seem to, however, be related to how multilingualism will be accommodated by the thickness of the auditory brain regions: increasing thickness of the first gyrus when no duplications are present, and decreasing thickness of the second gyrus for participants with more than one TTG.

The fact that the most multilingual participants in the current sample had thinner cortex in their second TTG might not automatically point to the conclusion that multilingual language experience is associated with this specific neural marker. In fact, polyglotism and multilingualism could partly result from innate predispositions (i.e. language aptitude), which in turn have been associated with brain structural markers within the TTG (Turker et al., 2017; Turker et al., 2021). However, we observed that accounting for typology (i.e. including information regarding how languages spoken by the participants differed from each other in terms of their phonological systems) explained more variance in the cortical thickness data of the second TTG than an index of language experience accounting for the age of exposure to different languages alone. The contribution of typological distance to our results is important, since it strengthens our interpretation that the observed results are more likely to be due to experience-induced plasticity and not to predispositions: it is far less likely that specific brain anatomical features would induce individuals to learn specific language combinations. It also has to be noted, however, that research has established relationships between population-level genetic factors (distribution of DCDC2 READ1 regulatory element) and characteristics of phoneme inventory of language(s) predominant in that population (DeMille et al., 2018; Tang et al., 2020), and that genetic influences on auditory cortex anatomy have previously been observed (Cai et al., 2014; Guadalupe et al., 2014), making it possible that our results may in some part also be related to genetic rather than purely environmental factors.

Our data show that, within the auditory cortex, language experience is particularly related to gyri in the superior temporal plane, and not to the rest of the PT (as shown in the analysis investigating the sub-sample of participants with a single gyrus in the right hemisphere), nor to other auditory regions such as posterior STG, as shown in the first, exploratory analysis across broader auditory cortex subregions. The posterior STG has been previously shown to be an essential site for language and phonological processing (Bhaya-Grossman and Chang, 2022; Hamilton et al., 2021; Hillis et al., 2017), and for representing acoustic-phonetic features of speech sounds (Lakretz et al., 2021; Mesgarani et al., 2014). We had predicted that we would find effects of differences between our multilingual participants’ languages at the acoustic and articulatory feature level within posterior STG, however indices related to the degree of multilingualism in our sample were not related to its structure. Tuning to the different acoustic-phonetic features might be an experience-independent feature of the posterior STG (i.e. it might be sensitive to features both present and absent from the languages a person knows), and therefore multilingualism might not induce any neuroplastic changes to this region. Alternatively, our findings may suggest that current language models might underestimate the role of early auditory regions (i.e. of HG and second TTG, when present) in phonological processing, and support their role beyond an initial spectro-temporal analysis of speech sounds. Future research, using both structural and functional mapping, is needed to clarify the respective roles of TTG(s) and STG in phonological processing.

With regard to the specific typological features that did best explain our results, we found that accounting for overlaps between languages in terms of their phoneme-level sound structure (i.e. discrete sound categories present in the individual languages’ phonological inventories) was the best predictor of the thickness of the second TTG, and that a measure of how many unique phonemes each participant was exposed to across all their languages explained variance in the thickness of the left second TTG above and beyond language experience (in the larger main sample). Functional neuroimaging work by Fisher et al., 2018, has shown that speech sounds, and specifically vowel formants, are encoded in tonotopic auditory regions including HG and the STG, suggesting that even early auditory regions such as HG and second TTG (when present) are involved in speech sound processing. Similarly, Bonte et al., 2014 found that vowels can be decoded from fMRI signal of (among others) the temporal plane, HG, and sulcus (see also Jäncke et al., 2002; Obleser and Eisner, 2009; van Atteveldt et al., 2004 for findings of processing of isolated phonemes in the HG and PT regions); Rutten et al., 2019, showed that attending to speech sounds (stop consonants) in pseudowords results in an increase in the neural processing of higher temporal modulations in regions as early as HG and also in the PT. It is therefore plausible that our finding of an association between greater multilingual language experience and decreased thickness of the second TTG arises from increased processing demands (and associated cortical pruning, see below) inherent to the acquisition and mastery of many non-overlapping phonological inventories. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, previous studies did not account for fine variation in the exact individual anatomy of the TTG (i.e. single versus multiplicated gyri). Our results may thus call for a re-evaluation of the specific anatomical site within the superior temporal plane in which phonemes are preferentially processed: based on our results, the second TTG (when present) could be a possible candidate.

Apart from the phoneme-based typological distance measure explaining more variance in cortical thickness of the second TTG in the main sample, the data from the replication sample showed that phonological feature-level language distance measure explained additional variance (to the composite language experience measure) in the thickness values. We believe that this inconsistency across samples might be related to the smaller sample size in the replication analysis (and therefore lower power to detect the effect) and the particular phonological characteristics of participants’ languages. Specifically, the replication sample included 31 individuals (i.e. 46% of participants) who spoke German and English, a language combination that has a phonological feature distance of zero. In contrast, the main sample included a more heterogenous mix of 34 different languages. Notably, however, in the replication sample, the phonemes-based typological distance measure numerically explained more variance in the thickness of the second TTG than a composite language experience measure based on AoA of different languages, as observed in the main sample.

The decreased thickness of the second TTG in relation to greater multilingualism may arise from different, non-exclusive microstructural and physiological mechanisms, including functional remapping, experience-driven pruning and neural efficiency, or learning-related increased myelination. Primary auditory cortex is known to lie within the anterior-medial part of HG (i.e. the first TTG; Rademacher et al., 1993), although there is no exact correspondence between cytoarchitectural and macrostructural boundaries (Rademacher et al., 2001). In vivo markers for human primary auditory cortex have been identified, including tonotopy, increased myelination (Dick et al., 2017), and decreased cortical thickness (Zoellner et al., 2019). Also, there is evidence that in professional musicians, functional activation extends to posterior TTGs during listening to musical sounds, while activation is confined to HG in non-musicians (Schneider et al., unpublished findings). Our findings of thinning in relation to extensive multilingual language experience with a wider diversity of speech sounds could be speculatively interpretated as arising from spatial expansion of primary-like functionality to the second TTG, when present. This spreading of primary-like processing may subsequently induce specialization and pruning of the more posterior gyrus. Alternatively, it could be that the secondary auditory regions beyond HG may be specialized for the processing of (cross-linguistic) phonological information, and this might result in experience-driven pruning. Experience-induced pruning is essential for maintaining an efficient and adaptive neural network. It reinforces relevant neural circuits for faster more efficient information processing, while diminishing those that are less active, or less beneficial. The cortical specialization may need to arise because phonologically more diverse language experience requires that the mapping of acoustic signal to sound categories is denser, more detailed, and more intricate. As a result, the brain may need to engage in more intensive processing to discriminate between and accurately perceive the sound categories of each language. This increased cognitive demand may, in turn, require the auditory and language processing regions of the brain to adapt and become more efficient. Over time, this heightened effort for successful speech perception and sound discrimination may lead to neural plasticity, resulting in cortical specialization. This means that cortical areas become more finely tuned and specialized for processing the unique phonological features of language(s) spoken by individuals. Why this occurs in the second TTG and not in non-gyral portions of the superior temporal plane (i.e. in the PT more generally) remains to be explored in future work, but one possibility is that gyri are more likely to host such a specialized function due to their greater neuronal density or to specific micro-anatomical features and connectivity properties (i.e. greater proximity and thus more direct, local functional, and structural connectivity of neurons within the gyrus, as opposed to with neurons within the sulcal parts). Either way, the neural efficiency account would be in line with the Dynamic Restructuring Model of bilingualism (Pliatsikas, 2020), according to which the ‘peak efficiency’ stage of multilingual functioning comes hand in hand with reductions in local volume. Of note, our supplementary analysis (see Appendix 1 – Effects of language proficiency) investigating second TTG thickness in relation to proficient versus non-proficient languages points to the tentative conclusion that the observed reduced thickness results might be driven by experience with proficiently spoken languages (more so than with non-proficiently spoken ones), aligning with the predictions of the Dynamic Restructuring Model.

Another potential microstructural mechanism underlying the thinner cortex result could be increased myelination of second TTG; this would again be in line with the idea that multilingual language experience leads to modifications such that the second TTG becomes more ‘primary-like’, since HG is characterized by higher myelination. It has been suggested that the apparent thinning of the ventral temporal cortex during childhood (as argued by, e.g., Sowell et al., 2004) is actually driven by increased myelination, since increased myelination in deep cortical layers can shift the apparent gray-white boundary in MR images Natu et al., 2019; see also Mediavilla et al., 2022, for evidence on learning-related contraction of gray matter being associated with adaptive myelination in rodents. Given the cross-sectional design of the current study, the above explanations remain hypotheses to be tested in further longitudinal studies of language acquisition, preferably ones using myelin mapping (Lutti et al., 2014; Marques et al., 2010) to explore the underlying physiological mechanisms in more details.

Future research should also further increase the degree of detail in describing the multilingual language experience, as both AoA and proficiency (used here) are not sensitive to other aspects of multilingualism, such as intensity of the exposure to the different languages, or quantity and quality of language input. Since these aspects have been convincingly shown to be associated with neural changes (e.g. Romeo, 2019), incorporating further, more detailed measures describing individuals’ language experience could further enhance our understanding of cortical plasticity in general, and how the brain accommodates variable language experience in particular.

Interestingly, in individuals who have only one TTG (i.e. no duplications), we find that multilingualism is related to thickness but in the opposite direction (note that we did not perform a replication analysis of the positive correlation between HG (first TTG) thickness and language experience in the replication sample due to the limited number of individuals presenting with only one gyrus.) We speculate that there might be different mechanisms underlying plasticity in regions more likely to contain primary versus secondary auditory cortex. In other words, it may be more likely that experience-induced pruning occurs in secondary compared to primary regions, and that in primary regions, greater efficiency comes at the cost of a neuronal ‘bulking’. Alternately but non-exclusively, it could be that in people who do not have a second TTG, HG needs to accommodate both lower-level auditory processing and also the processing of more complex speech sounds. Further research, especially with larger samples of participants with a single TTG, is needed to elucidate the opposite direction of the relationship between multilingualism and cortical thickness in HG versus the second TTG in our results.

Different methodological tools are available for capturing the variability of TTG. Most previous studies used either manual labeling, whole-brain approaches involving normalizing structural images to a common template space in order to assess regional variation in gray or white matter probability, or automated pipelines serving to segment and label different ROIs (e.g. VBM or FreeSurfer). Both approaches have important advantages, the former allowing for high precision in capturing details of individual variation, the latter two being far less time-consuming and labor-intensive, and therefore more applicable to large datasets. In the current study, we capitalized on recent developments in cortical segmentation efforts and used an automatic toolbox (TASH; Dalboni da Rocha et al., 2020) specifically designed for fine delineation of auditory cortex gyri, and extraction of measures describing their anatomy. Coupled with visual inspection of the data, TASH provides a ‘best-of-both-worlds’ approach, by being anatomically precise while involving little manual involvement with the data (which also tends to be error-prone). The measures we obtained align with the high degree of variability reported in previous literature, but they also seem to be more sensitive, since we identify more multiplications of the TTG than previously reported. For example, in Marie et al., 2015, out of 232 subjects, 204 (88%) had one gyrus (including partially duplicated) in the left hemisphere, 28 (12%) had a complete posterior duplication; the prevalence of further multiplications was not assessed in that study. In our data, a minority of participants (4%) presented only one gyrus in the left hemisphere, and most of them had either two (57%) or three (35%) separate gyri. TASH identifies gyri based on anatomical landmarks and curvature values, and unlike previous descriptive work is surface-based rather than volume-based. It therefore might be more sensitive to shallow cortical folds that might otherwise not be discernable in volume-based manual labeling. The precise functional relevance of these multiplications remains to be uncovered in future research, and more work is needed to further ascertain anatomical accuracy of the segmentation of posterior gyri in the superior temporal plane.

Notably, such variability in shape of the auditory regions is absent from other, evolutionarily older, species: macaques’ auditory cortex is flat, and some chimpanzees have only a single gyrus (Hackett et al., 2001). By showing that a human-specific experience, i.e., speaking multiple languages, is reflected in the anatomy of cortical regions that seem to be evolutionarily particular to humans, we contribute to informing both models of neuroplasticity and of language evolution.

A large body of work has provided insights into both how the brain processes auditory information and speech signals (see Bhaya-Grossman and Chang, 2022; Moerel et al., 2014, for overviews), and into how bi- and multilingualism are related to the structure of the brain (see García-Pentón et al., 2016; Li et al., 2014; Pliatsikas, 2020, for overviews). In the current study, we brought together both strands of research in an effort to investigate how the auditory cortex accommodates multilingual experience, thereby providing insights into the intricate functioning of auditory processing in humans. Apart from showing that individual anatomy appears to constrain the architecture of phonological representations, our findings also support the idea that experience with typologically similar languages might be different from experience with typologically distant languages (Antoniou, 2019; Berthele, 2020; Li et al., 2014). Indeed, across two independent datasets, we show, for the first time, that cortical thickness of early auditory brain regions is related to the degree of one’s language experience coupled with typological distance between the languages one knows. These findings indicate that early auditory regions seem to represent (or be shaped by) 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 STG and STS.

The PHOIBLE database (Moran and McCloy, 2019) and open-source software (Dediu and Moisik, 2016) were used to construct measures of typological distances between the languages. Data were analyzed with publicly available software: CAT12 toolbox (https://neuro-jena.github.io/cat/), FreeSurfer 7.2 (https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu), TASH (https://github.com/golestaniBLLab/TASH, Degano, 2025), ASJP.R (https://github.com/Sokiwi/InteractiveASJP01, Wichmann, 2019), R (with the following packages: stringdist, SYNCSA, entropy, lme4, lmerTest, olsrr, sensemakr) and Python (scipy.spatial.distance function). Figures were created with FreeView (part of FreeSurfer) and R (packages: ggplot2, pheatmap) and compiled in Keynote.

The current paper used anatomical brain scans of 204 healthy, right-handed participants from the Predicting Language Outcome and Recovery After Stroke (PLORAS) database (Seghier et al., 2016). Raw data cannot be made publicly available due to restrictions of the project's ethical approval; raw data can be shared for non-commercial use after contacting the corresponding author and completing a data sharing agreement. Code used for performing the analyses can be accessed through OSF at: https://osf.io/uc52f/ (doi: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/UC52F). The OSF repository (https://osf.io/uc52f/) includes all processed data used for the analyses (see under data/data.csv).

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