Proverbio, A. M., Roberta, A., Alberto, Z. (2007). The organization of multiple languages in polyglots: Interference or independence? Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 25–49.
One of the most common debates in bilingual or multilingual studies is whether there is independence or interference between the two or more languages. Past literatures tended to support the interference view more. Interference could be dependent on language proficiency or age of acquisition (AOA). The first aim of this paper was to tease apart the effects of AOA and language proficiency on the brain activation of multilinguals. The second goal was to investigate what kind of interference the bilinguals were exposed to. In Experiment 1, three groups of speakers were recruited: the Italian monolingual group, the Italian-English bilingual group, and the interpreter group who are highly proficient in Italian and English. The Italian monolinguals acquired English at similar periods as the interpreters but these two groups of speakers differed in their English proficiency. The difference between the bilingual group and the interpreter group was whether there is more than one language in their early age. Bilinguals acquired more than one language (i.e., Italian and English) at their early age but the interpreters had only one language at their early age. The authors used a semantic decision paradigm in which subjects had to decide whether an English sentence makes sense or not. Results showed that monolinguals had similar patterns as interpreters. The bilinguals performed faster than the other two groups, indicating that AOA is important. Although proficiency still played a crucial role, it was not as significant as AOA. Furthermore, the RT patterned similarly for the two response hands for them. However, the mean RT difference between the two response hands in the bilingual group was greater than the RT difference in the interpreter and the monolingual group, indicating that bilinguals showed more brain lateralization than the other two groups. Experiment 2, which was an orthographic decision task, explored whether the increasing interference of the linguistic system was due to the number of linguistic systems that are known or whether it is dependent on the language that is activated on local temporal exposure. The author tested two groups of native Italian speakers who could also speak English fluently and at least knew 4 languages. The difference between these two groups was that one group of speakers could speak German fluently while the other group could not. The target languages in Experiment 2 were Italian, English, and German. Results showed that the interference was stronger for the German fluent group. The conclusion was that, when subjects knew a lot of languages, the interference was highly correlated to temporal linguistics exposures. More specifically, only the target languages that were activated had interference effects.
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