Bilingual and Monolingual Brains Compared: A
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation
of Syntactic Processing and a Possible ‘‘ Neural
Signature’’ of Bilingualism
Ioulia Kovelman1,2, Stephanie A. Baker1, and Laura-Ann Petitto
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2008
"Eleven Spanish-English right-handed bilinguals...and 10 English right-handed monolinguals" were asked to judge the plausibility of sentences containing relative clauses while in the fmri. OS and SO sentences were both used. Bilinguals judged twice as many sentences as monolinguals. Results indicate that bilinguals have differentiated language systems and use more left brain gray matter than monolinguals.
Because English is an analytic language and Spanish is syntactic, there was no difference in brain functioning when bilinguals were judging OS and SO in Spanish; English monolinguals showed more activity when processing SO ("difficult") than OS ("easy").
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