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Individual variability and neuroplastic changes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2014

David W. Green
David W. Green*
Affiliation:
University College London
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Extract

An important proposal in the insightful Keynote Article by Baum and Titone is that the field of bilingualism research needs to attend more closely to intersubject variability in order to understand the nature of neuroplastic changes in the brains of bilingual speakers as they age. I agree. Understanding such variability and its drivers (such as the contexts of language use that Baum and Titone nicely comment on in the Montreal milieu) will help us develop theoretical accounts of the cognitive control processes recruited in bilingual speakers and establish how adaptive changes to these processes mediate the effects of normal aging; yield protective effects against neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer disease; and modulate language recovery poststroke in bilingual speakers. In this commentary I explore some aspects of this variability and commend, in line with the views expressed in the Keynote Article, the value of relating behavioral indices to whole brain structural magnetic resonance imaging for enriching our understanding of experience-dependent changes. Allied to tractography studies, such research can help us develop a rich picture of the major drivers of neuroplastic changes.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 910 - 912
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

REFERENCES

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