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Language and Cognition01:27

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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 12, 2025

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Intersecting distributed networks support convergent linguistic functioning across different languages in bilinguals.

Shujie Geng1,2, Wanwan Guo1,2, Edmund T Rolls1,3,4

  • 1Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China.

Communications Biology
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Bilingual brains use overlapping neural networks for both native and second languages, showing functional assimilation and anatomical accommodation. This reveals how different languages are co-represented in the brain.

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Neuroimaging studies investigate how bilingual brains process multiple languages.
  • The assimilation-accommodation hypothesis suggests shared and new neural networks for second language processing.
  • Finer-grained anatomical and functional details of this hypothesis remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis at detailed anatomical and functional levels in bilingual brains.
  • To examine how neural networks support processing of native and second languages.
  • To understand the co-representation of languages in the brain.

Main Methods:

  • Neuroimaging (fMRI) was used to scan Chinese-English bilinguals.
  • Participants performed an implicit reading task involving Chinese words, English words, and Chinese pinyin.
  • Analysis focused on brain cortical regions and their functional roles across languages.

Main Results:

  • Broad cortical regions showed interdigitated neural populations supporting the same cognitive components for different languages.
  • Spatially distinct regions, including parts of the inferior frontal gyrus and temporal gyri, performed similar linguistic functions across languages.
  • Evidence of regional-level functional assimilation supported by voxel-wise anatomical accommodation was observed.

Conclusions:

  • Findings support the functional independence of neural representations for different languages.
  • Most language regions exhibit co-representation organization for both native and second languages.
  • The study reveals linguistic-feature specific accommodation and assimilation between first and second languages in bilinguals.