A school-language advantage found for arithmetic processing in bilingual children when investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging

This study provides first evidence of a neural school language advantage for bilingual children. In comparison with HL, who were not trained in the task language, SL demonstrated less activations that were less spread throughout the brain. During the 3-operand condition, HL demonstrated seven peak activations more than the SL, not only in the left visuomotor zones recruited during all conditions in both groups, but also in righthemispheric areas. These additional peak activations demonstrate that HL rely more on working memory and visual attentional resources. A similar pattern was replicated in the 4-operand condition where HL showed six more peak activations than SL. These findings clearly suggest a more specialized and efficient number processing in SL, which hints a 'language-of-training advantage' (Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001) for solving arithmetical problems in the school language for both simple and complex conditions.

Publication year:2009

Keywords:neuroimaging, bilingualism, mental calculation