BECAME - Bilingual Experiences, Cognitive Ageing and underlying Mechanisms

The goal of the Bilingual Experiences, Cognitive Ageing and underlying Mechanisms (BECAME) project is to examine the functional neuroplastic mechanisms underlying mitigatory effects of bilingual experience on age-related cognitive decline. While evidence is available for structural brain changes supporting bilingualism-induced effects on cognitive aging (CA), functional mechanisms underlying such effects are not yet well understood. BECAME aims to fill this gap by investigating the trajectory of bilingualism-induced functional neuroplasticity across the whole adult lifespan, crucially adopting an individual differences approach related to the measurable degree of bilingual engagement. Importantly, although such benefits are thought to be rooted early in the lifespan, evidence for the timeframe and conditions of their early emergence is scarce. The choice of including the whole adult lifespan allows us to investigate these mechanisms and their emergence more directly from a lifelong perspective. BECAME combines behavioral testing with brain recordings via electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is widely used in cognitive neuroscience to assess brain activity and the degree of communication between brain regions (functional connectivity) in response to stimuli and at rest. Combining behavioral and EEG modalities will allow us to test bilingualism’s effect on functional connectivity, as well as its consequences for functional efficiency, the minimum required neural activation to successfully perform a task. This will enable a detailed, evidence-based account of the protective effects observed in older-aged bilinguals, and how they are built from earlier life stages. By illuminating the relationship between multilingualism and resulting neurocognitive adaptations, BECAME has concrete potential to be translated into actionable policies exploiting multilingualism to ameliorate effects of CA.

Funding agency: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Project number: 101106069 (link to project page on CORDIS)

Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01

Grant amount: 210 911,04 €