Abstract
Life-long experience of using two or more languages has been shown to enhance cognitive control abilities in young and elderly bilinguals in comparison to their monolingual peers. This advantage has been found to be larger in older adults in comparison to younger adults, suggesting that bilingualism provides advantages in cognitive control abilities. However, studies showing this effect have used a variety of tasks (Simon Task, Stroop task, Flanker Task), each measuring different subcomponents of attention and raising mixed results. At the same time, attention is not a unitary function but comprises of subcomponents which can be distinctively addressed within the Attention Network Test (ANT) (1, 2). The purpose of this work was to examine the neurofunctional correlates of the subcomponents of attention in healthy young and elderly bilinguals taking into account the L2 age of acquisition, language usage, and proficiency. Participants performed an fMRI version of the ANT task, and speed, accuracy, and BOLD data were collected. As expected, results show slower overall response times with increasing age. The ability to take advantage of the warning cues also decreased with age, resulting in reduced alerting and orienting abilities in older adults. fMRI results showed an increase in neurofunctional activity in the frontal and parietal areas in elderly bilinguals when compared to young bilinguals. Furthermore, higher L2 proficiency correlated negatively with activation in frontal area, and that faster RTs correlated negatively with activation in frontal and parietal areas. Such a correlation, especially with L2 proficiency was not present in young bilinguals and provides evidence for a bilingual advantage in the alerting subcomponent of attention that characterizes elderly bilinguals' performance. This study thus provides extra details about the bilingual advantage in the subcomponent of attention, in older bilinguals. Consequently, speaking more than one language impacts cognition and the brain later in life.
Highlights
Enjoying a satisfying aging, with regard to cognitive health, is desirable by people globally
Over the years, neuroimaging studies have shown neural efficiency for bilingual elderly groups when compared to monolingual counterparts suggesting less activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) [11, 13, 16]
Accuracy for the correct trials was submitted to a mixed ANOVA with group as a between subject variable (YA and old adults (OA)) and warning cue and flanker condition as within subject variables
Summary
With regard to cognitive health, is desirable by people globally. In the context of lifelong bilingualism, cognitive reserve can be conceptualized as a cognitive resilience resulting from the use of, and exposure to, two or more languages In such a context, it is believed that practiced bilingualism provides cognitive resilience to the cognitive control mechanisms allowing to counter, partially or totally the impact of age-related changes in the brain. Various studies suggest that lifelong bilingualism, or speaking two languages on a daily basis, can result in advantage in cognitive control processes i.e., how individual with high or low level of bilingualism or when compared to their monolingual peers differ in their behavioral [7, 10,11,12] and brain functions [11, 13,14,15,16,17]. Berroir et al [15] suggest efficient performance for the bilingual older adults in the task-based functional connectivity measures
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