Benefits of a bilingual brain
Bilingualism and language similarity
Humans are capable of learning multiple languages without major difficulty, especially at an early age. While this brings obvious advantages such as intercultural communication and enhanced career prospects, bilingualism has also been linked to changes to selective attention and inhibition of unwanted information. Although behavioral differences between monolinguals and bilinguals on tasks of selective attention remain controversial4,5, the experience of learning and using a second language undoubtedly represents a major environmental demand that can impact the way the brain processes information. Here we investigate how early second-language acquisition influences the neural mechanisms of auditory selective attention, and whether this is further affected by the typological similarity between the two languages. We address these questions in a natural listening context, by investigating the neural encoding of continuous attended narratives under different types of linguistic and non-linguistic interference in Spanish-English and Dutch-English early bilinguals.
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