The bilingual brain allows new insights and predictions on human capabilities. Comment on 'The bilingual brain: Flexibility and control in the human cortex' by Buchweitz and Prat. (Note)

摘要

Over the last few decades, the cognitive neurosciences have deployed sophisticated theoretical and methodological tools to understand the brain bases of multilingualism. Buchweitz and Prat [1] review of recent literature on the bilingual brain offers several insights in that respect. First, the application of cognitive neuroscience methods to bilingualism transcends issues of second language research. Analogous to using impaired and brain-injured populations to study cognitive functions, studies that target bilingual populations can be fruitfully used to answer specific questions about higher-order processes more broadly, and obtain answers that complement studies with monolingual populations. For example, the finding of increased activation in the basal ganglia in bilingual individuals over monolinguals tells us something beyond bilingualism per se, namely that new brain areas are involved in processing language. The study by Stocco and colleagues [2,3] adds to recent proposals that another subcortical area, the hippocampus-dependent declarative memory system, is engaged in language use and processing [4]. While traditionally the neocortex has been studied as the primary seat of the language faculty in the brain, the role of a broader network of cortical and subcortical areas in language should be clarified. This will help us to link language with other non-linguistic cognitive functions in the brain. It will also help shed new light on the origins and evolution of language in the human species. Such questions have proven elusive and notably difficult to tackle due to a lack of direct historical evidence such as language records. Therefore, findings that subcortical, evolutionary older parts of the brain have numerous interconnections with cortical areas in learning and processing language can fill an important gap in our understanding of how language came about in the human species.