Albert Costa, ICREA researcher at the Department of Information and Communications Technologies at UPF, together with Kristof Strijkers, former UPF researcher, have participated in a study which has shown that when performing language tasks, bilinguals and monolinguals use the areas of the brain involved differently, even though the language studied is the native and dominant one.

The study in which UPF has participated, in the framework of the Speech Production and Bilingualism research group (SPB) led by Albert Costa at the Cognition and Brain Center, has been coordinated by the Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging Research Group of Jaume I University of Castellón, under the direction of César Ávila Rivera, professor of Basic Psychology, and has been recently published in the scientific journal Brain  & Language.

"One of the main conclusions reached is that at the level of the brain there are no differences between bilingual and monolingual people when they hear their mother tongue, but there is when they speak it. In addition, it appears that monolinguals make more efficient use of the typical areas of language processing, which is complemented with the use of other brain areas", says Albert Costa.

Designation of images and listening to words by two groups of students

To conduct their research, the scientists enjoyed the participation of students from Jaume I University and the collaboration of the Castellón Provincial Hospital, where the functional magnetic resonance imaging studies were performed. 

The sample was composed of two groups of students: on the one hand, simultaneous bilinguals (Spanish and Catalan) from a very early age, whose language of preference is Spanish; and on the other hand, monolinguals for whom Spanish is their native language. All of them had to perform two tasks in Spanish, one naming task based on images and the other listening to words.

"The study has revealed that monolinguals, when performing naming tasks, are slightly quicker than bilinguals", explains Carlos Costa. For this reason, monolinguals use the areas of the brain for processing language (such as the left middle temporal gyrus) more than bilinguals, while bilinguals use more areas related to the control of language (such as the posterior cingulate). However, no differences were found between bilinguals and monolinguals when listening to words.

Moreover, in this research the difference produced in the bilingual sample by cognate words (same meaning and phonologically similar, like for example, -meaning "ear" in Catalan-Spanish- "orella-oreja") and non-cognate words (same meaning but different phonologically: meaning "bed"- "llit-cama") was analysed. In this sense, the bilinguals used the anterior cingulate cortex more when naming the images. This area is related to executive control and, in this particular case, with being able to manage the use of the language required in this task.

In addition, when performing the task of listening to words, the bilinguals used more the left upper temporal gyrus when listening to cognate words and the right upper temporal gyrus when listening to the non-cognate words. These brain areas are related to the auditory and semantic processing of words.

This research is part of a broader project of the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 programme called "Bilingualism and cognitive neuroscience", a consortium made up of four Spanish universities (Jaume I, Pompeu Fabra, University of Barcelona and University of the Basque Country) whose aim was to study bilingualism, in particular its neural bases.

Reference work:

María-Ángeles Palomar-García, Elisenda Bueichekú, César Ávila, Ana Sanjuán, Kristof Strijkers, Noelia Ventura-Campos, Albert Costa (2015), " Do bilinguals show neural differences with monolinguals when processing their native language?",  Brain & Language, volume 142, March 2015, pages 36-44. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2015.01.004

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