The Representation of a Multilingual Language System in the Brain: On the Influence of Certain Variables

One of the main questions in multilingualism research concerns the shared or separate representation of languages in the mind & in the brain. Behavioral data & data from aphasia studies as well as from functional imaging studies support both hypotheses. Here, I concentrate on the functional imaging studies with healthy bi- or multilinguals in an attempt to define the variables & their influence on the representation of two or more languages in the brain. Up to date, five factors can be distinguished. The modality (language production vs language perception) & the level of language processing tested (single words, sentence, text) play an important role in this respect, so do age of acquisition & proficiency, which were the specific focus of investigation in some of the studies. Age of acquisition appears to be the more determinant factor in language production, while proficiency may have a more critical effect in language perception. In addition, some studies reveal differences in the activation patterns between languages & between groups of subjects reflecting the employment of different processing strategies. 1 Table, 31 References. Adapted from the source document