Neural convergence for language comprehension and grammatical class production in highly proficient bilinguals is independent of age of acquisition

Comparing language outcomes in monolingual and bilingual stroke patients

“…A main effect of group membership (bilingual versus monolingual) need not imply any differences at all in terms of the association between increasing damage in key brain regions, and increasing symptom severity. This result is consistent with the claim that monolingual and bilingual brains share essentially the same language networks, though bilingual brains may exhibit enhanced loading and so increased sensitivity to damage in some parts of that network—as proposed in the neural convergence account of the bilingual brain (Green, 2003; Consonni et al , 2013). By contrast, we could find no instances where there was ‘strong or better’ support (Jeffreys, 1961) for neural divergence accounts, which predict that the bilingual brain should recruit different regions for processing a non-native, second language (including the procedural/declarative model, which predicts that such differences will emerge principally in sentence processing tasks).…”

“…An alternative account of bilingual language processing—the neural convergence account—argues that identical regions mediate monolingual and bilingual language (Green, 2008; Consonni et al , 2013) both during lexical processing (Parker Jones et al , 2012) and grammatical processing (Abutalebi, 2008). Although common regions are active for native and non-native languages, the functional demand on these regions is higher for bilingual speakers (Abutalebi and Green, 2007; Parker Jones et al , 2012).…”

Language Control and Code-switching

“…Each lexical concept or construction is identified in terms of the language to which it belongs, that is, it is tagged for language membership (e.g., Albert and Obler 1978;Green 1986;Poulisse and Bongaerts 1994) by a link to a language node (e.g., Dijkstra and Van Heuven 2002). Such linkage allows functionally distinct but interconnected networks (Kroll et al (2010) for further discussion) and is consistent with evidence of intermingled neuronal populations mediating language representation (Consonni et al 2013;Green 2003;Paradis 2004) and for wider discussion (Green and Kroll forthcoming). We followed Hartsuiker et al (2004) in supposing that common syntactic constructions, that underlie congruent lexicalisation, are represented by combinatorial nodes (see also Kootstra et al 2010).…”

Grey Matter Volume in the Cerebellum is Related to the Processing of Grammatical Rules in a Second Language: A Structural Voxel-based Morphometry Study

“…This is due to maturational constraints of the procedural system, which make it harder to access and utilise by late learners of an L2. To investigate the effects of AoA on L2 processing, Consonni and colleagues [22] tested balanced Italian–Friulian bilinguals and Friulian late learners of Italian (AoA, 3–6 years) in an fMRI experiment with a task combining comprehension and production: it required the generation of a verb or a noun as a response to a description, in both Friulian and Italian. Both groups were highly proficient in both languages.…”