Bilingualism at the core of the brain. Structural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals revealed by subcortical shape analysis

Naturally acquiring a language shapes the human brain through a long-lasting learning and practice process. This is supported by previous studies showing that managing more than one language from early childhood has an impact on brain structure and function. However, to what extent bilingual individuals present neuroanatomical peculiarities at the subcortical level with respect to monolinguals is yet not well understood, despite the key role of subcortical gray matter for a number of language functions, including monitoring of speech production and language control — two processes especially solicited by bilinguals. Here we addressed this issue by performing a subcortical surface-based analysis in a sample of monolinguals and simultaneous bilinguals (N = 88) that only differed in their language experience from birth. This analysis allowed us to study with great anatomical precision the potential differences in morphology of key subcortical structures, namely, the caudate, accumbens, putamen, globus pallidus and thalamus. Vertexwise analyses revealed significantly expanded subcortical structures for bilinguals compared to monolinguals, localized in bilateral putamen and thalamus, as well as in the left globus pallidus and right caudate nucleus. A topographical interpretation of our results suggests that a more complex phonological system in bilinguals may lead to a greater development of a subcortical brain network involved in monitoring articulatory processes.This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (JCI-2009-04492, PSI2010-20168), the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO-PSI2012-34071), the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement n°323961, and Grup de Recerca en Neurociència Cognitiva (GRNC), AGAUR (2014 SGR 1210 N). M.B. was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO-FPDI-2013-17528). N.S.G. received the prize ICREA Academia for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. We thank Albert Costa for his comments on an earlier version of this manuscript

A psycholinguist who spoke his mouth: Introduction to the special issue on bilingualism in honour of Albert Costa

International audienceAlbert Costa was a dear friend and colleague who died young but accomplished much. We provide a brief sketch of his scientific contributions to the field of psycholinguistics and bilingualism. The articles included in the special issue are then presented along three research topics developed by Albert Costa in his own career: Lexical access in bilingualism, executive control in bilingualism, and judgement and decision making in a foreign language. The articles explore topics such as competition within and across words in unimodal or bimodal bilinguals, and its links to domain-general executive control, the reshaping of word form knowledge following second language learning, the stakes and methods involved in investigating accented speech, and the contrast between decision making in the native or second language. We hope this collection provides an up-to-date perspective on the rich field of bilingualism research, and a modest homage to our late friend and colleague

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, bi-phones, and bi-syllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users to either upload a set of words to receive their properties, or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espa