Gray matter volume differences between early bilinguals and monolinguals: A study of children and adults

Gray matter has been shown to be greater in early bilingual adults relative to monolingual adults in regions associated with language (Mechelli et al., 2004), and executive control (EC; Olulade et al., 2016). It is not known, however, if language experience‐dependent differences in gray matter volum...

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Veröffentlicht in:Human brain mapping 2022-11, Vol.43 (16), p.4817-4834
Hauptverfasser: Schug, Alison K., Brignoni‐Pérez, Edith, Jamal, Nasheed I., Eden, Guinevere F.
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Gray matter has been shown to be greater in early bilingual adults relative to monolingual adults in regions associated with language (Mechelli et al., 2004), and executive control (EC; Olulade et al., 2016). It is not known, however, if language experience‐dependent differences in gray matter volume (GMV) exist in children. Further, any such differences are likely not to be the same as those observed in early bilingual adults, as children have had relatively shorter duration of dual‐language exposure and/or less development of brain regions serving EC. We tested these predictions by comparing GMV in Spanish–English early bilingual and English monolingual children, and Spanish–English early bilingual and English monolingual adults (n = 122). Comparing only children revealed relatively more GMV in the bilinguals in bilateral frontal, right inferior frontal, and right superior parietal cortices (regions associated with EC). Bilinguals, however, had less GMV in left inferior parietal cortex (region associated with language). An ANOVA including these children with bilingual and monolingual adults revealed interactions of Language Background by Age Group. There were no regions of more GMV in bilinguals relative to monolinguals that were less pronounced in children than adults, despite the children's shorter dual‐language experience. There were relative differences between bilingual and monolingual children that were more pronounced than those in adults in left precentral gyrus and right superior parietal lobule (close to, but not directly in areas associated with EC). Together, early bilingual children manifest relative differences in GMV, and, surprisingly, these do not diverge much from those observed in studies of bilingual adults. We compared, for the first time, gray matter volume (GMV) in Spanish–English early bilingual and English monolingual children and found a robust difference of relatively more GMV in the bilinguals in regions associated with executive control, and less GMV in regions associated with language. Next, an ANOVA including these two groups of children together with bilingual and monolingual adults revealed that this pattern of GMV differences in bilingual relative to monolingual children diverges from that of bilingual relative to monolingual adults in only a few brain regions, despite adults having a much longer dual‐language experience. These findings provide important insights into the effect of an early dual‐language experience on br
ISSN:1065-9471
1097-0193
DOI:10.1002/hbm.26008