Intersecting distributed networks support convergent linguistic functioning across different languages in bilinguals

This neuroimaging study investigates how bilingual brains process multiple languages, focusing on the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis. The study scanned Chinese-English bilinguals during an implicit reading task involving Chinese words, English words, and Chinese pinyin. Results revealed broad cortical regions with interdigitated neural populations supporting the same cognitive components across languages, indicating regional-level functional assimilation supported by voxel-wise anatomical accommodation. The findings verify the functional independence of neural representations of different languages while showing co-representation of both languages in most language regions, revealing linguistic-feature specific accommodation and assimilation between first and second languages.

Shujie Geng, Wanwan Guo, Edmund T. Rolls, Kunyu Xu, Tianye Jia, Wei Zhou, Colin Blakemore, Li-Hai Tan, Miao Cao, Jianfeng Feng