The first language related post on this blog!

As a moderately skilled German-English bilingual, I found this article appearing in the latest issue of Science interesting. According to Crinion et al. (2006), while the same language-related areas of the brain in proficient bilinguals are activated irrespective of the language used, they report that the left caudate plays an important role in monitoring and controlling language in use. Furthermore, these findings extended to three different bilingual populations.

Comments:

1. I do not have a problem with a priming study saying that the difference lies in the attention to context and not semantic representation (whatever that is).

2. At the sentence level, I would expect to find language-specific differences in what is being attended to in various contexts depending on what is marked in a particular language vs. another.