Abstract
It remains controversial whether long-term logographic-logographic bilingual experience shapes the special brain functional subnetworks underlying different components of executive function (EF). To address this question, this study explored the differences in the functional connections underlying EF between the Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals and Mandarin monolinguals. 31 Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals and 31 Mandarin monolinguals were scanned in a 3-T magnetic resonance scanner at rest. 4 kinds of behavioral tasks of EF were tested. Network-based statistics (NBS) was performed to compare the connectomes of fronto-parietal (FP) and cingulo-opercular (CO) network between groups. The results showed that the bilinguals had stronger connectivity than monolinguals in a subnetwork located in the CO network rather than the FP network. The identified differential subnetwork referred to as the CO subnetwork contained 9 nodes and 10 edges, in which the center node was the left mid-insula with a degree centrality of 5. The functional connectivity of the CO subnetwork was significantly negatively correlated with interference effect in bilinguals. The results suggested that long-term Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual experience was associated with stronger functional connectivity underlying inhibitory control in the CO subnetwork.
Highlights
With the development of globalization, more than half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2013)
Because different executive function (EF) tasks were used across functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on bilingualism, different brain regions associated with EF were identified in these studies
Two studies (Berken et al, 2016; Kousaie et al, 2017) used a seed map analysis to analyze functional connectivity related to EF in bilinguals, and they used EF-related regions as the seeds, the left inferior frontal gyrus and ventral medial prefrontal cortex, respectively
Summary
With the development of globalization, more than half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2013). Emerging brain functional neuroimaging studies have attempted to reveal the neural substrates of bilingualism’s effect on EF Most of these studies concentrated on which brain regions were activated in bilinguals during certain EF tasks (see reviews (Pliatsikas and Luk, 2016; Hayakawa and Marian, 2019)). Studies using resting-state fMRI to investigate the brain networks underlying EF in bilinguals are limited (Grady et al, 2015; Berken et al, 2016; Kousaie et al, 2017). Two studies (Berken et al, 2016; Kousaie et al, 2017) used a seed map analysis to analyze functional connectivity related to EF in bilinguals, and they used EF-related regions as the seeds, the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) and ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), respectively. The seed map analysis was limited by the a priori selection of seed regions, so the two studies identified different EF networks
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