How does our experience with language impact human brain organization? In this presentation, I will focus on research that we have conducted spanning three decades in which we combined behavioral methods with functional neuroimaging (PET and fMRI) under different language learning scenarios, to investigate how neural recruitment is influenced by the age of acquisition, proficiency in the language, and the distinctive characteristics of languages. bilingual learning environments.ĭenise Klein, Director, Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Faculty of Medicine, McGill UniversityĬognitive Neuroscience Unit, Montreal Neurological Institute Language experience as a window into brain plasticity and organizationĪbstract.
![monolingual vs bilingual brain monolingual vs bilingual brain](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/su2012sslgweekonefullpp-120724185906-phpapp02/95/su2012-ss-lg-week-one-full-pp-33-728.jpg)
I will discuss whether these differences observed between the two populations can be considered as two different types of cognitive adaptations to monolingual vs. When novel and familiar linguistic information are contrasted within the same experimental task, young infants from monolingual backgrounds tend to allocate more attention (e.g., as measured by the duration of sustained attention) toward the familiar linguistic information, while young bilingual infants exhibit greater attention toward the unfamiliar linguistic events. bilingual environments distribute their cognitive resources (e.g., attention, as reflected by behavioral and neural/physiological correlates) differently, when it comes to processing novel vs. I will particularly focus on the idea of whether infants from monolingual vs. In this talk, I will highlight research on bilingual acquisition during the first two years of life. Learning linguistic regularities in a bilingual environment during the first two years of lifeĪbstract. Monika Molnar, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto