PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - García-Pentón, Lorna
AU  - Fernández, Yuriem
AU  - Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
AU  - Pérez, Alejandro
AU  - Carreiras, Manuel
TI  - Neuroanatomical Correlates in Bilinguals: The Case of Children and Elderly
AID  - 10.1101/586768
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 586768
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/25/586768.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/25/586768.full
AB  - How bilingualism modulates brain areas beyond the language regions is still controversial. Through a comprehensive set of analyses on brain structure, we investigated brain differences between Basque-Spanish bilinguals and monolinguals in children and the elderly, the most sensitive target groups to detect potential brain differences. In particular, we employed Diffusion MRI in combination with T1-MRI, network-based statistics and a graph-theoretical approach to investigate differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in structural connectivity and topological properties of brain networks. Additionally, regional grey and white matter structural differences between groups were examined. The findings suggest that the effects of bilingualism on brain structure are not solid but unstable. However, lifetime experience of active bilingualism may lead to increased neural reserve in ageing, since better global network graph-efficiency has been observed in the elderly lifelong bilinguals compared to monolinguals.