The goal of the present review is to discuss recent cognitive neuroscientific findings concerning bilingualism. Three interrelated questions about the bilingual brain are addressed: How are multiple languages represented in the brain? how are languages controlled in the brain? and what are the real-world implications of experience with multiple languages? The review is based on neuroimaging res...

OBJECTIVE Clinic-based studies suggest that dementia is diagnosed at older ages in bilinguals compared with monolinguals. The current study sought to test this hypothesis in a large, prospective, community-based study of initially nondemented Hispanic immigrants living in a Spanish-speaking enclave of northern Manhattan. METHOD Participants included 1,067 participants in the Washington/Hamilt...

Childhood bilingualism has long been associated with enhanced creative performance. The neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, however, have yet to be characterized. Research suggests bilingualism modifies neural networks for executive control. Such changes, which can be assessed with estimation of neural signal complexity, are thought to increase information processing capacity. We thus...

Recent evidence suggests a positive impact of bilingualism on cognition, including later onset of dementia. However, monolinguals and bilinguals might have different baseline cognitive ability. We present the first study examining the effect of bilingualism on later-life cognition controlling for childhood intelligence. We studied 853 participants, first tested in 1947 (age = 11 years), and ret...

Computational modeling and bilingualism have had until recently only limited interactions (see reviews in French & Jacquet, 2004; Hernandez, Li, & MacWhinney, 2005; Li & Farkas, 2002; Thomas & van Heuven, 2005). Bilingualism has been the norm rather than the exception in our globalized world, but the acquisition of two languages entails significant complexity that challenges empirical methodolo...