Cognitive Neuroscience of Cross-Language Interaction in Bilinguals

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to introduce a Special Issue of Brain Science dedicated to the neuroscientific investigation of the influences of the native language on the second language and, reciprocally, of the second language on the native language in bilinguals.

A vast number of studies have established that mental representations of a bilingual’s different languages interact at various representation levels (e.g., phonological, grammatical, semantic) in both comprehension and production. If the evidence is compelling, the mechanisms underlying such phenomena continue to elude us. How are such representations neuroanatomically organised? They appear to interact dynamically, but how? What are the constraints applying to the interaction between language representations in bilinguals and how do language characteristics shape the mutual influence of languages on one another at various levels of encoding? Also, how much functional autonomy do language representations enjoy from generic cognitive control systems in the human mind? It is clear that language processing is intrinsically bound to conceptual (including nonverbal) processing, attention, emotion, short-term and long-term memory, etc., but are these functional dependencies language-dependent or do they apply to the faculty of language as a whole?

Submissions are invited to this Special Issue of Brain Science that aim to tackle one of the questions above or any related one using cognitive neuroscience methods in a predictive fashion. Contributions reporting results from experiments using methods that have a tangible relation to brain function are particularly encouraged (e.g., electrophysiology, in particular EEG and MEG, fMRI, NIRS, TMS, tDCS), but also studies using methods from behavioural neuroscience such as eye-tracking, electrodermal conductivity, and reaction time modelling, and that investigate how the two languages interact with one another in the bilingual mind, by modulating representations from each of the two languages, creating intermediary, hybrid mental representations, and modulating cognitive processing in real time.

Dr. Guillaume Thierry
Dr. Aina Casaponsa
Guest Editors

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