Abstract
Learning and using multiple languages places major demands on our neurocognitive system, which can impact the way the brain processes information. Here we investigated how early bilingualism influences the neural mechanisms of auditory selective attention, and whether this is further affected by the typological similarity between languages. We tested the neural encoding of continuous attended speech in early balanced bilinguals of typologically similar (Dutch-English) and dissimilar languages (Spanish-English) and compared them to results from English monolinguals we reported earlier. In a dichotic listening paradigm, participants attended to a narrative in their native language while ignoring different types of interference in the other ear. The results revealed that bilingualism modulates the neural mechanisms of selective attention even in the absence of consistent behavioural differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. They also suggested that typological similarity between languages helps fine-tune this modulation, reflecting life-long experiences with resolving competition between more or less similar candidates. The effects were consistent over the time-course of the narrative and suggest that learning a second language at an early age triggers neuroplastic adaptation of the attentional processing system.
Highlights
Humans are capable of learning multiple languages without major difficulty, especially at an early age
Two major views guiding research on auditory selective attention were the ‘early-selection’ and the ‘late-selection’ approaches[8,9,10], where the early-selection theories argued that, due to our limited processing capacity, attended and unattended information is differentiated early on; while late-selection accounts proposed that selective attention dissociates inputs based on semantic encoding and analysis, after both streams had undergone equivalent perceptual processing
This study aimed to establish whether the demands of learning and using a second language influence the neural mechanisms of auditory selective attention, and whether this might be further affected by the typological similarity between the two languages
Summary
Humans are capable of learning multiple languages without major difficulty, especially at an early age. Even if the behavioural findings about enhanced attentional control cannot be generalized across tasks and different types of bilinguals, it is unequivocal that learning and using multiple languages represents a major environmental demand, which can modify the way the brain processes information. This reflects the brain’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment, and is equivalent to learning-induced neural changes seen across other cognitive domains[33,34,35]. How bilingualism modifies the way speakers track and encode natural continuous speech in the presence of interference remains largely unknown
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