Advances in our understanding of bilingual brain organization: A look back and a view forward

Abstract

Multilingual and bilingual environments provide natural settings to study the implications of acquiring and developing competence in more than one language. Models of language processing have often focused on monolingual contexts, but researchers who live in countries where bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm, have an opportunity to extend these ideas; the work discussed here focuses on two such linguistic contexts, South Africa and Canada. In 1992, Klein and Doctor took inspiration from English-Afrikaans bilinguals to extend models of monolingual processing to bilingual individuals. Since then, Klein and colleagues have taken advantage of the unique language environment of Quebec, Canada, and the substantial possibilities arising from the burgeoning field of functional neuroimaging to explore how two languages exist in a single cognitive system and what that tells us about neural representations. More recently there has been a burgeoning of research in this field, examining also the implications of bilingual language processing for cognition more generally. Our paper reviews the progress made in the field, from the original findings of Klein and Doctor to key findings and advances that have taken place since then.