Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. This occurs because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. When the colour and the word match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don’t match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). ![]() In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language. A Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. ![]() Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called ‘ language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. If you hear ‘can’, you will likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. The findings provide fascinating insight into the neural resources that facilitate bilingual language use and are discussed in terms of how early-life language experiences can modify the neural systems underlying human language processing.According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. Later-exposed bilinguals showed greater recruitment of the prefrontal cortex relative to early-exposed bilinguals and monolinguals. ![]() However, age of first bilingual exposure does matter. ![]() Early bilingual exposure imparts fundamental changes to classic language areas instead of alterations to brain regions governing higher cognitive executive functions. However, important differences were observed between early-exposed and later-exposed bilinguals in their earliest-exposed language. Bilingual participants included early-exposed (bilingual exposure from birth) and later-exposed individuals (bilingual exposure between ages 4–6).īoth bilingual children and adults showed greater neural activation in left-hemisphere classic language areas, and additionally, right-hemisphere homologues (Right Superior Temporal Gyrus, Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus). We compared how typically-developing bilingual and monolingual children (ages 7–10) and adults recruit brain areas during sentence processing using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging. Is the developing bilingual brain fundamentally similar to the monolingual brain (e.g., neural resources supporting language and cognition)? Or, does early-life bilingual language experience change the brain? If so, how does age of first bilingual exposure impact neural activation for language?
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