Psychological Science Faculty Publications

Bilingual versus monolingual cross-sectional neuroimaging studies of adults: A scoping review

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-29-2026

Abstract

Objective: The past 2 decades have seen the emergence of cross-sectional neuroimaging studies of bilingual versus monolingual adults that aim to determine neural correlates of the lifelong bilingual experience. Method: Systematic review using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines identified 85 such peer-reviewed, published, English language studies through June, 2024 involving 106 different neural analyses. Results: Aside from four large N studies, the mean number of participants was 22 with the mean age for most (69%) bilingual samples in the 18–27-year decile. There was no uniform operational definition of bilingualism versus monolingualism with most (67%) studies relying on self-report questionnaires of language experience. Statistical comparisons of bilingual versus monolingual groups were primarily conducted for age (52% of studies) and years of education (30%). Neural analyses showed an increase in activity (64% of analyses), gray (65%), and white matter (54%) metrics for the bilingual groups. The most frequently reported sites of the bilingual versus monolingual differences were in the superior longitudinal fasciculus (38% of track analyses), inferior frontal gyrus (28% of regional analyses), superior temporal gyrus (22%), inferior parietal lobule (19%), and anterior cingulate cortex (19%) without a dominant hemisphere lateralization effect. Conclusion: The first four sites have been identified from lesion studies as the main language processing areas of the brain (when confined to the dominant hemisphere), and the last with behavioral inhibition. There was noise across the review with multiple sites (e.g., occipital lobe) that have never been associated with language or executive processing, showing bilingual versus monolingual neural differences in isolated studies.

Comments

Not open access.

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Publication Title

Psychology & Neuroscience

DOI

10.1037/pne0000387

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