Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain

Abstract

The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and the consequences that bilingualism holds for cognition and the brain over the life span. Contrary to the view that bilingualism complicates the language system, this new research demonstrates that all of the languages that are known and used become part of the same language system. The interactions that arise when two languages are in play have consequences for the mind and the brain and, indeed, for language processing itself, but those consequences are not additive. Thus, bilingualism helps reveal the fundamental architecture and mechanisms of language processing that are otherwise hidden in monolingual speakers.

The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience.

“…Empirical evidence came much later, with research showing cross-language facilitation and interference in simple lexical tasks (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000; Costa, Santesteban, & Ivanova, 2006; Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999; Hermans, Bongaerts, de Bot, & Schreuder, 1998), but the significance of the insight or of the empirical findings were not fully understood. Kroll, Dussias, Bice, and Perrotti (2015) provide a detailed review of these studies and consider this evidence for joint activation to be a major discovery in the efforts to understand bilingualism. Joint activation means there is constant competition for selection, so bilinguals must control attention to language representations and language processing in a way not required for monolinguals.…”

A Novel Theoretical Life Course Framework for Triggering Cognitive Development across the Lifespan

“…Future work should systematically investigate how all of these factors causally impact cognitive development in aging adults in the natural environment [e.g., immersive context vs. classroom; Kroll, Dussias, Bice, & Perrotti, 2015; see also immersion vs. home-based individual training, Stine-Morrow et al, 2014] and in well-controlled settings (e.g., lab-based experiments). One of the benefits of our proposed interventions is that they are scalable, similar to physical exercise [Merzenich, 2013], and can therefore be applied in smaller or larger doses depending on individual requirements.…”

Language Control and Code-switching

“…However, are variations in levels of activation a sufficient mechanism to account for the pattern of language use in the corpus data? Experimental evidence indicates that even when only one language is in play, lexical representations and grammatical constructions are active in the other language and lexical representations reach to the level of phonological form (e.g., (Blumenfeld and Marian 2013;Christoffels et al 2007;Costa et al 2000;Hoshino and Thierry 2011;Kroll et al 2015) for a review). Given the corpus data cited above, top-down processes of control must allow speakers to produce words and constructions in just one language in a code-switching context despite parallel activation of words and constructions in the other language (for further discussion of bottom-up and top-down processes of language control, see (Kleinman and Gollan 2016;Morales et al 2013)).…”