Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 109, Issue 20, Pages 7877-7881Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1201575109
Keywords
brainstem; electrophysiology; multilingualism
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [1015614]
- Mathers Foundation
- Hugh Knowles Center of Northwestern University
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01HD059858]
- National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training [T32 DC009399-01A10]
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie
- SBE Off Of Multidisciplinary Activities [1015614] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Bilingualism profoundly affects the brain, yielding functional and structural changes in cortical regions dedicated to language processing and executive function [Crinion J, et al. (2006) Science 312: 1537-1540; Kim KHS, et al. (1997) Nature 388: 171-174]. Comparatively, musical training, another type of sensory enrichment, translates to expertise in cognitive processing and refined biological processing of sound in both cortical and subcortical structures. Therefore, we asked whether bilingualism can also promote experience-dependent plasticity in subcortical auditory processing. We found that adolescent bilinguals, listening to the speech syllable [da], encoded the stimulus more robustly than age-matched . Specifically, bilinguals showed enhanced encoding of the fundamental frequency, a feature known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was associated with executive function advantages. Thus, through experience- related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound. This study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions.
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