Is there any cognitive and cerebral advantage for being bilingual?
A functional neuroimaging follow-up study in South Tyrol The research is aimed at investigating whether bilingualism bears advantages upon general cognitive processing such as general executive and attentive functions. In detail, it is a hotly debated issue whether subjects who learn two languages are better equipped or less equipped for those tasks that rely upon general decision-making processes than their monolingual counterparts. The assumption underlining the hypothesis of a “cognitive advantage” for bilinguals is the following: since bilinguals have to handle early with two linguistic systems (i.e., language A and language B) they learn very early decision-making processes (i.e., which language to be used in which context). Following some researchers, this very early decision-making process faculty would provide a “cognitive advantage” to bilinguals through everyday life that may be generalized to other cognitive domains such as executive and intellective functions.
For this purpose, we will carry out a comparative study between bilinguals from South Tyrol and monolingual control groups from Milan and from South Tyrol. Noteworthy, this will be done both in adult bilinguals and in children learning an L2 (second language). The group of children will be further investigated by a follow-up study aimed at detecting plastic neural changes following increasing L2 proficiency.
Behavioral, structural and functional neuroimaging (VBM=Voxel-based morphometry, and fMRI=functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies will be carried out during a language switching task and in a task that investigates general cognitive executive functions (i.e., Flanker task). Comparisons will be made between bilinguals and monolinguals and, in the follow-up study, between bilinguals at different time periods. This latter aspect may potentially provide neural evidence on how L2 learning enhances the performance of general cognitive functions.
The results of the research, if a “cognitive advantage” is confirmed for bilinguals, may provide useful inputs in educational fields.
Duration: 3 years (2008-2011)
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