Article One

From the Society for Neuroscience:
Brain Briefings: The Bilingual Brain

My question was how brain structure and functioning differ between monolingual and bilingual brains. This article from the Society for Neuroscience concisely answers this question without weighing itself down with hard to understand terms. To summarize: the article points out that through recent research we have found that there is a substantial difference in how monolingual and bilingual brains function, especially if the bilingual brain became fluent in it's languages before the age of five. Bilingual people show increased ability to concentrate on tasks demonstrated not only in behavioral observation but also in fMRI scans of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, the area of the right hemisphere associated with attention and control. They have also found that bilingual brains have denser gray matter in the left hemisphere which is responsible for language. Interestingly, they have found that when dealing with only one of their two languages bilingual brains primarily use the left hemisphere, while when actively switching between languages bilingual brains primarily use their right hemisphere. This implies that when dealing with individual languages bilingual brains are more or less intuiting the language (much like monolingual brains do) but when dealing with them together the brain has to actively "translate" which requires more effort.