Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation may induce language switching in bilingual patients

Event-related potentials (ERPs) in the study of bilingual language processing

“…Several studies have provided evidence for the involvement of the frontocentral ''executive'' brain areas in bilinguals (Fabbro et al, 2000), using functional magnetic resonance imaging (Abutalebi et al, 2007a(Abutalebi et al, , 2007bCrinion et al, 2006;Hernandez et al, 2001;Hernandez & Reyes, 2002;Price et al, 1999;Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2002, 2005Wang et al, 2007) and transcortical magnetic stimulation (Holtzheimer et al, 2005). These data seem to agree with Bialystok's (2001) proposal, i.e., a non-specific control mechanism is naturally tuned and developed in highly proficient (and probably early) bilinguals, giving them an advantage in various switching/inhibitory tasks.…”

Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control

“…Interestingly, rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) applied over the left prefrontal cortex of two bilingual subjects as treatment for major depression induced language switching (Holtzheimer, Fawaz, Wilson, & Avery, 2005), though we cannot tell whether rTMS directly stimulated language switching (by shifting the language goal) or disrupted inhibition of the non-target language. More direct evidence of between-language competition comes from the study by Rodriguez-Fornells et al (2002).…”

Theta burst stimulation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modulates pathological language switching: A case report

“…Verhoef et al [32] recently demonstrated that inhibition, even if not necessary, can modulate the efficiency of language switching. Interestingly, two bilingual patients have been reported in whom language switching was apparently triggered by high frequency rTMS applied to the left DLPFC [17].…”