Earlier second language acquisition is associated with greater neural pattern dissimilarity between the first and second languages

It is controversial as to how age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency level of the second language influence the similarities and differences between the first (L1) and the second (L2) language brain networks. In this functional MRI study, we used representational similarity analysis to quantify the degree of neural similarity between L1 and L2 during sentence comprehension tasks in 26 adult Chinese-English bilinguals, who learned English as L2 at different ages and had different proficiency levels. We found that although L1 and L2 processing activated similar brain regions, greater neural pattern dissimilarity between L1 and L2 was associated with earlier AoA in the left inferior and middle frontal gyri after the effect of proficiency level was controlled. On the other hand, the association between proficiency level and the neural pattern dissimilarity between L1 and L2 was not significant when the effect of AoA was partialled out. The results suggest that the activity pattern of L2 is more distinct from that of L1 in bilingual individuals who acquired L2 earlier and that the contribution of AoA to the neural pattern dissimilarity is greater than that of proficiency level.