"Given this concern, we took a different approach and instead compared gray matter volume between adult bilinguals and monolinguals. "Inconsistencies in the reports about the bilingual advantage stem primarily from the variety of tasks that are used in attempts to elicit the advantage," says senior author Guinevere Eden, DPhil, director for the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC). Even if the advantage is robust, the mechanism is still being debated. But skepticism still remains about whether these advantages are present, as they are not observed in all studies. This "bilingual advantage" is believed to come about because of bilinguals' long-term use and management of two spoken languages. However, it has since been demonstrated that bilingual individuals perform better, compared with monolinguals, on tasks that require attention, inhibition and short-term memory, collectively termed "executive control." Early on, bilingualism was thought to be a disadvantage because the presence of two vocabularies would lead to delayed language development in children. Differential activation may further provide a fascinating window into the language processing potential not recruited in monolingual brains and reveal the biological extent of the neural architecture underlying all human language.In past decades, much has changed about the understanding of bilingualism. The differential activation for bilinguals and monolinguals opens the question as to whether there may possibly be a “neural signature” of bilingualism. The results provide insight into the decades-old question about the degree of separation of bilinguals' dual-language representation. However, an important difference was that bilinguals had a significantly greater increase in the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the LIFC (BA 45) when processing English than the English monolinguals. ![]() fMRI analyses revealed that both monolinguals (in one language) and bilinguals (in each language) showed predicted increases in activation in classic language areas (e.g., left inferior frontal cortex, LIFC), with any neural differences between the bilingual's two languages being principled and predictable based on the morphosyntactic differences between Spanish and English. Results show that behaviorally, in English, bilinguals and monolinguals had the same speed and accuracy, yet, as predicted from the Spanish-English structural differences, bilinguals had a different pattern of performance in Spanish. ![]() If bilinguals' neural processing differs across their two languages, then differential behavioral and neural patterns should be observed in Spanish and English. The sentences exploited differences between Spanish and English linguistic properties, allowing us to explore similarities and differences in behavioral and neural responses between bilinguals and monolinguals, and between a bilingual's two languages. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants completed a syntactic “sentence judgment task”. ![]() Highly proficient and early-exposed adult Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals participated. Does the brain of a bilingual process language differently from that of a monolingual? We compared how bilinguals and monolinguals recruit classic language brain areas in response to a language task and asked whether there is a “neural signature” of bilingualism.
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