The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience.

According to some estimates, more than half of the world's population is multilingual to some extent. Because of the centrality of language use to human experience and the deep connections between linguistic and nonlinguistic processing, it would not be surprising to find that there are interactions between bilingualism and cognitive and brain processes. The present review uses the framework of experience-dependent plasticity to evaluate the evidence for systematic modifications of brain and cognitive systems that can be attributed to bilingualism. The review describes studies investigating the relation between bilingualism and cognition in infants and children, younger and older adults, and patients, using…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: R01HD052523, R21AG048431
• NS
  Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

  Award: A2559