To this end, special attention will be paid to bilingual populations. From a purely theoretical perspective, bilingualism offers a unique and crucial opportunity to elucidate certain fundamental questions regarding brain plasticity or about the relationship between linguistic competence and other general cognitive mechanisms, all of which are key issues within the field of cognitive neuroscience. In order to achieve this objective we took a multidisciplinary approach involving the coordinated efforts of researchers from different disciplines: psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, physicists, information technologists and medical researchers. The different groups involved in the project cover all these scientific disciplines.

One of the project’s central concerns was to consider not only the process through which a language or languages are acquired in a bilingual context, but also the implications that the use of two languages has for adult speakers in terms of both perception and production. To this end, two research lines were followed: the first focused on the initial periods of language acquisition, while the second considers aspects of representation and processing in adults, with attention being paid to elements related to individual differences. The second core interest of this project was centred on the mutual influence (at both the cognitive and neural levels) between bilingualism and other functions such as auditory perception, multi-sensory integration and executive control processes of attention. Addressing the phenomenon of bilingualism from such a broad perspective obviously requires a highly multidisciplinary approach. Therefore, this project was structured around several levels of analysis, ranging from low-level aspects related to neuronal dynamics, through electrophysiology and the analysis of behavioural phenomena to the implications for theoretical models of linguistics. The proposal is thus of critical importance at both the theoretical and practical levels.

The proposal set out herein was unique and innovative for the following reasons:

• It took advantage of the linguistic situation that is characteristic of Spain. This is especially relevant when one considers access to computer technology and current experimentation.
• It extended research into language processing (andin particular the processing of second languages) to the analysis of general processing mechanisms (perception, attention and decision making).
• It paid particular attention to development (the study is not restricted to adult populations but also considers babies and older adults/the ageing process). 

The programme used various types of methodologies and approaches:

• Experimental study: using behavioural techniques, electrophysiological recording and neuroimaging (both functional and structural)
• Theoretical formulation: in terms of both linguistics and computational neuroscience.

Although the participating teams have distinctive features, and specialise in different areas and techniques, they  took  part in the different areas and techniques, they will take part in the different research lines in a complementary and coordinated way