Differential neural control in early bilinguals and monolinguals during response inhibition Aina Rodríguez-Pujadas, Ana Sanjuán, Paola Fuentes, Noelia Ventura-Campos, Alfonso Barrós-Loscertales, César Ávila ⇑ Dept. of Psychology, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló de la Plana, Spain article info Article history: Accepted 10 March 2014 Available online 16 April 2014 Keywords: Early bilingualism Executive control Stop task Anterior cingulate cortex fMRI abstract We tested the hypothesis that early bilinguals and monolinguals use different brain areas when perform- ing nonlinguistic executive control tasks. For this, we explored brain activity of early bilinguals and mon- olinguals during a manual stop-signal paradigm. Behaviorally, bilinguals and monolinguals did not show significant differences in the task, which led us to compare brain activation that cannot be attributed to differences in performance. Analyses demonstrated that monolinguals activated the anterior cingulate cortex more than bilinguals when performing the stop-signal task. These results offer direct support for the notion that early bilingualism exerts an effect on neural circuitry responsible for executive control. Consistent with recent reports, we found that bilinguals used the anterior cingulate more efficiently than monolinguals to monitor nonlinguistic cognitive conflicts. Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In recent years, the effects of being bilingual on nonlinguistic cognitive processes have been broadly studied. For example, early studies showed that bilingual children solved a nonverbal conflict task in a different way than monolingual children (Bialystok & Majumder, 1998), and studies with bilingual adults have shown that bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals in specific tasks that involve conflict resolution and monitoring, and set shifting (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Costa, Hernández, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008; Hilchey & Klein, 2011). At present, how- ever, much less is known about the impact of bilingualism on brain organization of executive control (EC) functions. The few studies related to this issue suggested that bilingualism affects not only the efficiency of EC functioning but also the brain structures re- cruited when performing EC tasks (Abutalebi et al., 2012; Bialystok et al., 2005; Garbin et al., 2010; Luo, Luk, & Bialystok, 2010). With the present study, we expected to improve our knowledge about how bilingualism affects the brain networks involved in EC. More concretely, we put to test the hypothesis that there are differences between early or lifelong bilinguals and monolinguals in language areas recruited when performing an EC task. Research has overwhelmingly shown that when a bilingual per- son uses one language, the other is active at the same time during both comprehension and production. Despite this coactivation of languages, language control failures that lead to cross-language intrusions are scarce, at least in high-proficient bilinguals, which is evidence that bilinguals develop excellent language control abil- ities. Abutalebi and Green (2008) conducted a qualitative review on this issue and proposed that the language control mechanism in bilinguals was sustained by a set of brain areas: the anterior cin- gulate cortex (ACC), left inferior frontal cortex, left caudate and bilateral supramarginal gyri. This model was confirmed in quanti- tative meta-analyses examining bilingual language switching (Luk, Green, Abutalebi, & Grady, 2012). As a result of the acquisition of two languages during early age and the constant practice, bilingual speakers can continuously and extensively train this brain network involved in language control. It is important to note that this kind of language control may be considered a special case of EC. The mechanisms of EC recruited to resolve competition among linguis- tic representations may be similar to those recruited when resolv- ing competition among representations in perception and attention (Green, 1998). In fact, the brain areas related to the con- trol of executive processes are the bilateral ACC, inferior and med- ial frontal cortices and caudate (Robbins, 2007; Stuss, 2011), and include areas linked to language control. Accordingly, it seems rea- sonable to hypothesize cross-talk between the processes engaged in domain-general EC and those involved in language control. In fact, such cross-talk is at the basis of current explanations of the http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2014.03.003 0093-934X/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Dept. Psicologia, Universitat Jaume I, Campus Riu Sec, Fac. Salut, Edifici d’Investigación II, E-12071 Castelló, Spain. E-mail address: avila@psb.uji.es (C. Ávila). URL: http://www.fmri.uji.es (C. Ávila). Brain & Language 132 (2014) 43–51 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Brain & Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l