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The network of cortical and subcortical regions that contribute to articulation was examined in bilinguals using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were all fluent in French and English: half were bilingual from birth and half were 'late bilinguals' who had learned French after the age of 12. Overt articulation resulted in the bilateral activation of the motor cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum, and also the supplementary motor area, independent of the language spoken. Furthermore, the threshold and extent of the network involved in articulation was identical for the two bilingual groups with the exception of greater variation in the left putamen for the late bilinguals. These data challenge claims that age of acquisition results in fundamental differences in the neural substrates that subserve language in bilinguals.

Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test for the lateralization of the brain regions specifically involved in the recognition of negatively and positively valenced musical emotions. The manipulation of two major musical features (mode and tempo), resulting in the variation of emotional perception along the happiness-sadness axis, was shown to principally involve subcortical and neocortical brain structures, which are known to intervene in emotion processing in other modalities. In particular, the minor mode (sad excerpts) involved the left orbito and mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex, which does not confirm the valence lateralization model. We also show that the recognition of emotions elicited by variations of the two perceptual determinants rely on both common (BA 9) and distinct neural mechanisms.

This study attempted to determine whether haptic discriminations of shape (haptic task) activate the same tissue in the central cortical region of normal human subjects as do finger movements (opposition task). Opposition and haptic tasks both activated the central sulcus, as expected from previous imaging studies. The haptic task activated about 50% of the cortical territory activated by the opposition task. The results suggest that exploratory digital movements performed to collect precise somatosensory information and automatic movements performed during finger positioning activate partially overlapping parts of the sensorimotor cortex.