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Redefining bilingualism as a spectrum of experiences that differentially affects brain structure and function

V. Deluca,J. Rothman,E. Bialystok,C. Pliatsikas

Published 2019 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance This study sheds new light on the neuroanatomical adaptations resulting from bilingual language exposure and use, providing crucial insights into untangling the variability of findings in the existing literature. Our results demonstrate that differences in bilingual language experiences confer a range of systematic outcomes in terms of brain/mind adaptations. In doing so, our findings strongly support a shift away from traditional designs with bilingual vs. monolingual comparisons and toward an approach of modeling the experiences within bilingualism that give rise to neurocognitive adaptations. Crucially, we maintain that experience-based factors should be accounted for in all future studies investigating the effects of bilingualism on the brain and cognition. Learning and using an additional language is shown to have an impact on the structure and function of the brain, including in regions involved in cognitive control and the connections between them. However, the available evidence remains variable in terms of the localization, extent, and trajectory of these effects. Variability likely stems from the fact that bilingualism has been routinely operationalized as a categorical variable (bilingual/monolingual), whereas it is a complex and dynamic experience with a number of potentially deterministic factors affecting neural plasticity. Here we present a study investigating the combined effects of experience-based factors (EBFs) in bilingual language use on brain structure and functional connectivity. EBFs include an array of measures of everyday usage of a second language in different types of immersive settings (e.g., amount of use in social settings). Analyses reveal specific adaptations in the brain, both structural and functional, correlated to individual EBFs and their combined effects. Taken together, the data show that the brain adapts to be maximally efficient in the processing and control of two languages, although modulated ultimately by individual language experience.

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