Syntactic processing in the bilingual brain depends on age of language acquisition

Introduction: Two crucial questions are currently discussed in the field of bilingualism: The existence of a “critical period“ for second language acquisition and the question, whether first (L1) and second language (L2) are represented differently in the brain. Methods: We used functional MRI to examine grammatical processing in 36 highly proficient German-French bilinguals who had either acquired French (L2F) or German (L2G) after the age of ten years, or had acquired both languages before the age of three years (2L1). Subjects were asked to judge auditorily presented correct and syntactically violated short s…