Neural Activation in Bilinguals and Monolinguals Using a Word Identification Task

The study investigated word recognition during neural activation in monolinguals and bilinguals. We specifically examined retrieval blood-oxygenation changes the prefrontal cortex a code-mixed task. Participants completed gating task incorporating monolingual sentences Spanish-English while using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure changes. Word contained four phonotactic conditions: (1) voiceless initial consonants, (2) voiced (3) CV-tense words, (4) CV-lax words. Bilingual speakers had word-recognition capabilities similar even when identifying English outcomes suggested that functioning is for early age of acquisition (AOA) bilinguals words both sentences. Monolingual experienced difficulty with English-voiced consonant sounds; bilingual difficulties English-lax vowels. Results suggest localization speech perception may be populations, yet levels differed. Our findings this parity due (AoA) finding balance language (i.e., native-like proficiency) some instances processed same areas dedicated first processing.