The role of age of acquisition and language usage in early, high‐proficient bilinguals: An fMRI study during verbal fluency

Abstract

Abstract:We assessed the effects of age of acquisition and language exposure on the cerebral correlates of lexical retrieval in high-proficient, early-acquisition bilinguals. Functional MRI was used to study Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who acquired either Spanish or Catalan as a first language in the first years of life. Subjects were exposed to the second language at 3 years of age, and have used both languages in daily life since then. Subjects had a comparable level of proficiency in the comprehension of both languages. Lexical retrieval with the verbal fluency task resulted in the well-established pattern of left hemispheric activation centered on the inferior frontal region. The effect of age of acquisition was assessed by dividing the subjects into two groups, on the basis of the language acquired first (Catalan-born or Spanish-born bilinguals). Functional comparisons indicated that less extensive brain activation was associated with lexical retrieval in the language acquired earlier in life. The two groups were also different in language usage/exposure, as assessed with a specific questionnaire; in particular, the exposure to the second language (Spanish) was less intensive in the case of Catalans. This was reflected in a significant interaction, indicating a more extensive activation in Catalans during production in Spanish. Overall, these results indicate that, during a production task, both age of acquisition and language exposure affect the pattern of brain activation in bilinguals, even if both languages are acquired early and with a comparable level of proficiency.

ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence processing in native and non-native readers of English

“…While such changes in laterality have been reported, most neuroimaging evidence shows that non-identical neural sources in prefrontal cortex vary with language exposure or usage in early bilinguals (e.g., Perani et al, 2003) or vary in the extent of activation in Broca's area in late proficient bilinguals (Rüschemeyer, Fiebach, Kempe, & Friederici, 2005). In a recent paper Jeong and colleagues (2007) investigated the effect of syntactic similarity during L2 auditory language processing in Korean late trilinguals with equally high proficiency in their L2s (English and Japanese).…”

Native and non-native reading of sentences: An fMRI experiment

“…First of all, a general delineation must clearly be drawn between L2 production and L2 comprehension studies. Although not all production studies focus on the same cerebral areas, the general conclusion drawn by the vast majority of this research has been that L1 and L2 are represented, at least to some degree, distinctly in the bilingual brain (Kim et al, 1997;Perani et al, 2003). It has been proposed, however, that such differences are related to difficulties in articulating a foreign language, rather than distinct representation of L1 and L2 per se (Klein et al, 1994(Klein et al, , 1995.…”

Functional Dynamics of Dorsal and Ventral Reading Networks in Bilinguals

“…Evidence from the few available neuroimaging studies investigating bilingual reading has shown differences in regional activation profiles based on the L2 age-of-acquisition (AoA; Perani et al 2003;Wartenburger et al 2003), language proficiency (Meschyan and Hernández, 2006), and language orthography (Meschyan and Hernández, 2006;Das et al 2011;Jamal et al 2012). Overall, results from these studies revealed an extensive overlap in the language regions engaged for L1 and L2 reading in early, but not in late bilinguals (Wartenburger et al 2003).…”