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When Karl Kim immigrated to the United States from Korea as a teenager, he had a hard time learning English. Now he speaks it fluently, and he had a unique opportunity to see how our brains adapt to a second language. As a graduate student, Kim worked in the lab of Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist in New York. 1 They found evidence that children and adults dont use the same parts of the brain when they learn a second language. The researchers used an instrument called an MRI scanner to study the brains of two groups of bilingual people 2 . The other consisted of people who, like Kim, learned their second language later in life.People from both groups were placed inside the MRI scanner. This allowed Kim and Hirsch to see which parts of the brain were getting more blood and were more active. They asked people from both groups to think about what they had done the day before, first in one language and then the other. They couldnt speak out loud because any movement would disrupt the scanning. Kim and Hirsch looked specifically at two language centers in the brain, Brocas area, which is believed to control speech production, and Wernickes area, which is thought to process meaning. Kim and Hirsch found that both groups of people used the same part of Wernickes area no matter what language they were speaking. 3 People who learned a second language as children used the same region in Brocas area for both their first and second languages. People who learned a second language later in life used a different part of Brocas area for their second language. 4 Hirsch believes that when | 
