Neurolinguistics Aspects of Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

  Fundamental breakthroughs in the neurosciences, combined with technical innovations for measuring brain activity, are shedding new light on the neural basis of second language (L2)
processing, and on its relationship to native language processing (L1) (Perani & Abutalebi, 2005).  Over the past two decades, a large body of neuroimaging studies has been devoted to the study of the neural organization of language (De´monet, Thierry, & Cardebat, 2005; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004; Price, 2000 as cited in Abutalebi, 2008). The value that functional neuroimaging adds to language research is to improve the perspective on the distributed anatomy of language. Thus, it can be used with considerable precision to identify the neural networks underlying the different domains of language processing. In this paper some main issues related to neurolinguistics and second language acquisition with a focus on bilingualism will be discussed.