• Erika Skoe, Emily Burakiewicz, Michael Figueiredo, and Margaret Hardin.
• Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Storrs, CT 06269, USA; Affiliate of the Department of Psychological Sciences, Cognitive Sciences Program, Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Storrs, CT 06269, USA; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. Electronic address: erika.skoe@uconn.edu.
• Neuroscience. 2017 May 4; 349: 278-290.

AbstractThe central auditory nervous system (CANS) undergoes language-dependent tuning to enhance linguistically relevant features of sound. However, less is known about how dual-language exposure affects the CANS. Recent reports indicate that Spanish-English bilingual children and adolescents have larger neural responses to the fundamental frequency (F0) of vowels, as measured by the frequency-following response (FFR), a phase-locked response to sound. Given the cross-language significance of F0, this led us to hypothesize that enhanced neural responses to the F0 are not unique to Spanish-English bilingual children and adolescents but are instead a common feature of a CANS with significant early dual language experience. In support of this hypothesis, we found that early bilingual adults, representing more than a dozen languages, had more robust FFRs to the F0 compared to English-language monolinguals suggesting that bilingual experience imprints on the CANS in a similar fashion regardless of the languages of exposure. Taken together, our results suggest that early exposure to two linguistic sound systems primes the brain to respond to the F0, a basic feature of all speech sounds that signals important indexical information for vowel, talker, and language identification.Copyright © 2017 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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