Abstract
Bilinguals and musicians exhibit behavioral advantages on tasks with high demands on executive functioning, particularly inhibitory control, but the brain mechanisms supporting these differences are unclear. Of key interest is whether these forms of experience influence cognition through similar or distinct information processing mechanisms. Here, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in three groups – bilinguals, musicians, and controls – who completed a visual go-nogo task that involved the withholding of key presses to rare targets. Participants in each group achieved similar accuracy rates and responses times but the analysis of cortical responses revealed significant differences in ERP waveforms. Success in withholding a prepotent response was associated with enhanced stimulus-locked N2 and P3 wave amplitude relative to go trials. For nogo trials, there were altered timing-specific ERP differences and graded amplitude differences observed in the neural responses across groups. Specifically, musicians showed an enhanced early P2 response accompanied by reduced N2 amplitude whereas bilinguals showed increased N2 amplitude coupled with an increased late positivity wave relative to controls. These findings demonstrate that bilingualism and music training have differential effects on the brain networks supporting executive control over behavior.
Highlights
Conscious self-regulation of thought and action is mediated by executive functions (EF), a system that includes sub-components such as goal planning, self-monitoring, decision making, attention, mental flexibility, and inhibition [1,2]
Previous studies have shown better EF performance in nonverbal tasks by both bilingual children ([12,13], see [14] for meta-analysis) and adults ([15,16,17,18]; see [19] for meta-analysis) compared to their monolingual counterparts
Monolinguals showed the expected N2 effect associated with nogo trials, but for bilinguals the N2 was delayed by about 200 ms and showed a larger amplitude than that found for the monolinguals
Summary
Conscious self-regulation of thought and action is mediated by executive functions (EF), a system that includes sub-components such as goal planning, self-monitoring, decision making, attention, mental flexibility, and inhibition [1,2]. Monolinguals showed the expected N2 effect associated with nogo trials, but for bilinguals the N2 was delayed by about 200 ms and showed a larger amplitude than that found for the monolinguals These results were interpreted as evidence of the involvement of EF, inhibition, in bilingual language processing. If the bilinguals’ and musicians’ executive functions advantage is caused by similar mechanisms of neuroplasticity, ERP responses in both groups should be similar to each other but different than the control group The benefits of both music training and bilingualism are often linked with detection of competing response alternatives and inhibitory control over behavior, as discussed above. Our expectations are that the individual experiences created by music training and bilingualism have dissociable mechanisms for influencing control over behavior
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