Regular articleMultilingualism: an fMRI study
Section snippets
Participants
Twelve healthy male volunteers participated in this study following written informed consent according to institutional guidelines of the Ethics Committee of the Ghent University Hospital. All participants were between 19 and 49 years of age (mean ± SD, 27.6 ± 9.4 years) and were consistent right-handers as measured by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (laterality index: mean ± SD, 87% ± 14%; range, 66%–100%) (Oldfield, 1971) suggesting left cerebral dominance for language. All volunteers were
Behavioral data
As can deducted from Table 1, English is, on average, acquired three years later than French. However, in the northern (Dutch speaking) part of Belgium, both active and passive exposure to English is higher than it is to French (Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Z = −2.69, P = .007). Subjective proficiency is also estimated to be higher for English (Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Z = −2.49, P = .013), although this impression is not confirmed by the results of a short translation task, showing no significant
Discussion
Thus far, neuroimaging studies (PET and fMRI) have yielded inconsistent findings with respect to the hypothesis that in bilingual individuals different languages are represented and processed in distinct brain areas. Whereas some studies found that both languages are represented in the same brain area, at least for some aspects of language (e.g., Illes et al., 1999, Klein et al., 1995, Chee et al., 1999, Hasegawa et al., 2002, others found distinct cortical areas associated with each language
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