A role for the cerebellum in the control of verbal interference: Comparison of bilingual and monolingual adults

We evaluate brain structure sensitivity to verbal interference in a sentence interpretation task, building on previously reported evidence that those with better control of verbal interference show higher grey matter density in the posterior paravermis of the right cerebellum. We compare brain struc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2020-04, Vol.15 (4), p.e0231288-e0231288
Main Authors: Filippi, Roberto, Periche Tomas, Eva, Papageorgiou, Andriani, Bright, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Age
Animal cognition
Bilingualism
Biology and Life Sciences
Brain
Cerebellum
Education
Functional plasticity
Interference
Language
Linguistics
Medicine and Health Sciences
Morphometry
Neuroimaging
Questionnaires
Research and Analysis Methods
Semantics
Sensitivity analysis
Social Sciences
Studies
Substantia grisea
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We evaluate brain structure sensitivity to verbal interference in a sentence interpretation task, building on previously reported evidence that those with better control of verbal interference show higher grey matter density in the posterior paravermis of the right cerebellum. We compare brain structure sensitivity to verbal interference control across two groups, English monolingual (N = 41) and multilingual (N = 46) adults. Using voxel-based morphometry, our primary goal was to identify and explore differences in regional patterns of grey matter sensitivity to performance on the sentence interpretation task, controlling for group variability in age, nonverbal reasoning and vocabulary knowledge. There was no group difference in performance but there was a significant group effect in grey matter sensitivity to task performance in our region of interest: stronger sensitivity in the paravermis in bilinguals compared to monolinguals in accuracy performance in the high (relative to low) verbal interference condition. This effect was observed when the linguistic interference was presented in an unfamiliar language (Greek) but not when presented in the familiar language (English). Our findings suggest that multilanguage acquisition mediates regional involvement within the language network, conferring enhanced functional plasticity within structures (including the paravermis) in the service of control of linguistic interference.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0231288