It does, however, have some influence on the functional intercommunication between brain regions during reading, specifically in two regions associated with reading, which are functionally connected to those inside and outside of the reading network. Together these results suggest that an early Spanish-English bilingual experience does not modulate local brain activity for English word reading. A seed-to-voxel analysis using eight a priori selected seed-regions (placed in regions known to be involved in reading) revealed relatively stronger functional connectivity in bilinguals between two sets of regions: left superior temporal gyrus seed positively with left lingual gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus seed negatively with left anterior cingulate cortex. Activation analysis revealed no significant differences between the two groups. To examine the role of early bilingualism on the neural substrates supporting English word processing, we compared brain activity, as well as functional connectivity, in Spanish-English early bilingual adults (N = 25) and English monolingual adults (N = 33) during single-word processing. While the understanding of the neurofunctional organization of this uniquely human skill has advanced significantly, it does not take into consideration the common bilingual experiences around the world. Skilled reading is important in daily life. Differential activation may further provide a fascinating window into the language processing potential not recruited in monolingual brains and reveal the biological extent of the neural architecture underlying all human language. The differential activation for bilinguals and monolinguals opens the question as to whether there may possibly be a "neural signature" of bilingualism. The results provide insight into the decades-old question about the degree of separation of bilinguals' dual-language representation. However, an important difference was that bilinguals had a significantly greater increase in the blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the LIFC (BA 45) when processing English than the English monolinguals. fMRI analyses revealed that both monolinguals (in one language) and bilinguals (in each language) showed predicted increases in activation in classic language areas (e.g., left inferior frontal cortex, LIFC), with any neural differences between the bilingual's two languages being principled and predictable based on the morphosyntactic differences between Spanish and English. Results show that behaviorally, in English, bilinguals and monolinguals had the same speed and accuracy, yet, as predicted from the Spanish-English structural differences, bilinguals had a different pattern of performance in Spanish. If bilinguals' neural processing differs across their two languages, then differential behavioral and neural patterns should be observed in Spanish and English. The sentences exploited differences between Spanish and English linguistic properties, allowing us to explore similarities and differences in behavioral and neural responses between bilinguals and monolinguals, and between a bilingual's two languages. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants completed a syntactic "sentence judgment task". Highly proficient and early-exposed adult Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals participated. Abstract Does the brain of a bilingual process language differently from that of a monolingual? We compared how bilinguals and monolinguals recruit classic language brain areas in response to a language task and asked whether there is a "neural signature" of bilingualism.
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