English and Spanish Bilinguals’ Language Processing: An ALE-Based Meta-analysis of Neuroimaging Studies

The neural mechanisms underlying language processing in English and Spanish bilinguals remain a topic of intense investigation. No neuroimaging meta-analyses about English and Spanish bilinguals’ language processing, nevertheless, appeared in the past. In this meta-analysis, Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) technique was used to synthesize findings from 13 neuroimaging studies of total 231 Spanish-English or English-Spanish bilinguals. Results showed that there existed 6 peaks in 4 activated brain regions during Spanish processing and 13 peaks in 11 activated brain regions during English processing. In addition, results revealed two distinct peaks of two brain regions commonly activated during language processing across both languages: right insula and left precentral gyrus which may become potential markers for individuals who are bilingual in both English and Spanish. In addition, we found no significant difference in activation between English and Spanish, indicating that these two languages may engage similar neural pathways during language processing.