Study: Bilinguals demonstrate more robust brain capability than monolinguals

• Author: Israel National News
• Published date: 06 October 2022
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

In two studies of 59 and 60 normal hearing adults from the ages 19–35 years, researcher Dr. Hanin Karawani Khoury and her PhD student Dana Bsharat-Maalouf documented the differences in perception and physiological reactions in native Arabic speakers who are fluent in Hebrew as a second language and native Hebrew speakers. The studies are an attempt to solve the puzzling question as to why bilinguals take much longer than monolinguals to react to audible cues, yet still demonstrate more subcortical brain activity than those who only speak one language

"The synchrony between neural and cognitive-perceptual measures makes the research unique and reveals direct brain-behavior links, serving as the basis for a fuller understanding of bilingual speech perception in challenging listening conditions," Dr. Karawani said.

"Whereas the effects of bilingualism on speech perception in noise are widely studied, few studies to date have compared bilingual-monolingual performance when all participants are...