Contributions to the functional neuroanatomy of morphosyntactic processing in L2

Abstract

Studies about bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) have a long tradition within linguistic and psycholinguistic research. With the global population becoming more and more multilingual and the recent proliferation of research in cognitive neuroscience, an increasing number of studies examining the way our brain is able to learn, represent, and handle more than one language at the same time are currently available. However, few attempts have been made to transpose psycholinguistic models of SLA into functional neuroanatomic models. An important problem that arises when pursuing this goal is partially due to the delay in the development of cognitive neuroscience of language compared to psycholinguistics. In general, neurolinguistic models focus on very broad and general questions about bilingualism, whereas psycholinguistic research is already at the stage of addressing more specific and fine-tuned questions. This Granularity Mismatch Problem (Poeppel & Embick, 2005) in the degree of zooming into this research topic is not exclusive of L2 research, but it is present in language research in general (Hauser & Bever, 2008). In either case, it often becomes difficult to put together the results from these different perspectives into one integrated model.