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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on April 18, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(11):2706-2716; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn030
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© 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Language Conflict in the Bilingual Brain

Walter J.B. van Heuven1,2, Herbert Schriefers1, Ton Dijkstra1 and Peter Hagoort1,2

1 Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Radboud University Nijmegen, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Kapittelweg 29, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Address correspondence to Walter J. B. van Heuven, PhD, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom. Email: wvh{at}psychology.nottingham.ac.uk.

The large majority of humankind is more or less fluent in 2 or even more languages. This raises the fundamental question how the language network in the brain is organized such that the correct target language is selected at a particular occasion. Here we present behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data showing that bilingual processing leads to language conflict in the bilingual brain even when the bilinguals’ task only required target language knowledge. This finding demonstrates that the bilingual brain cannot avoid language conflict, because words from the target and nontarget languages become automatically activated during reading. Importantly, stimulus-based language conflict was found in brain regions in the LIPC associated with phonological and semantic processing, whereas response-based language conflict was only found in the pre-supplementary motor area/anterior cingulate cortex when language conflict leads to response conflicts.

Key Words: event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging • interlingual homographs • lexical decision • pre-supplementary motor area and anterior cingulated • response conflict


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