The Bilingual Brain

Introduction

Studying bilingual’s brain has been an area of interest to many psychologists. The complexity of the human brain and how it reacts when the person is producing words in different languages is really interesting to many people. Psychologist had used different hemodynamic measures such as PET, fMRI and MRI to follow the active parts of the brain used by bilinguals and by monolinguals.

The bilingual’s brain reacts in a different manner than monolingual’s brain. The reactions and the responses from bilinguals also depend on the age when they first learn their second language. When a bilingual person learns a second language since he was born or when he was really young this person is considered an early bilingual. On the other hand,

The influences in a bilingual family give children exposure to the correct way of speaking both languages. They are thought to express themselves in both ways and their parents teach them the right form of speaking. The main part is not only what their parents teach their children, but the exposure to the languages. This means that the more contact with people speaking more than one language the better chances they can recall that information. Since they are young, bilinguals are expected to know how to differentiate one language form the other, if they cannot notice the differences between both languages they can have problems speaking correctly. The differentiation between languages is call language discrimination. According to Costa & Gallanes (2014), every human being should have this ability, but there are many studies that show that monolinguals more easily discriminate the unknown language than bilinguals. This happens because they are just exposed to one language and have just one lexicon learned. Bilinguals on the other hand, have two different set of rules for both languages, and it takes longer to the brain

The frontal cortex helps them control their languages to just use the one they are looking for. The age in which bilinguals learn their second language is crucial to the fluency of the language. Early bilinguals are more likely to speak fluently in both languages because they learned the second language when they were developing their brain. The late bilinguals take longer to choose between languages because their first language is more developed than the second one.

Psychologists are interested on learning the differences between monolinguals, and early and late bilinguals. According to Rodriguez-Fornells (2005), the fMRI shows the different active parts of the brain while developing a picture naming task. The bilingual’s brain is very active and this is why there are many benefits of being a bilingual person. One of the benefits of having the brain active all the time is to prevent many brain dysfunctions. This topic is perfect to do many research and prove how beneficial is to the individuals being bilingual or being