Stimulating the prefrontal cortex and bilingual language control

What is it about?

Researchers stimulated the left and right prefrontal cortex and measured its effects on Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual young adults' performance on a language-switching task and a shape-color switching task. Stimulating the left prefrontal cortex worsened performance for bilinguals on the shape-color switching task, but improved performance for bilinguals on the language-switching task.

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Why is it important?

Many studies have proposed that bilinguals may have better executive functions (e.g., attention, switching, working memory, inhibition) than monolinguals because of their experience using two languages, which has been termed the "bilingual advantage". There is limited research connecting language and executive functions in the bilingual brain. Rather than measuring brain activity during a task, we stimulated the prefrontal cortex to examine how it impacted performance on a language-switching task and a shape-color switching task. We hypothesized that if stimulating the prefrontal cortex had similar impacts on language-switching and shape-color switching, it could help to explain the bilingual advantage at a neurological level. The results did not support our hypothesis about the role of the prefrontal cortex in explaining the bilingual advantage observed in other studies, but future research should examine other brain areas, such as the parietal lobe, anterior cingulate cortex, and basal ganglia.

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