Bilingualism represents a distinctive way to investigate the interplay between brain and behaviour, and an elegant model to study the role of environmental factors in shaping this relationship. Past neuroimaging research has mainly focused on how bilingualism influences brain structure, and how eventually the brain accommodates a second language. In this paper, we discuss a more recent contribution to the field which views bilingualism as lens to understand brain-behaviour mappings from a different perspective. It has been shown, in contexts not related to bilingualism, that cognitive performance across several domains can be predicted by neuroanatomical variants determined prenatally and largely impervious to postnatal changes. Here, we discuss novel findings indicating that bilingualism modulates the predictive role of these variants on domain-specific cognition. The repercussions of these findings are potentially far-reaching on multiple levels, and highlight the need to shape more complex questions for progress in cognitive neuroscience approaches to bilingualism.

中文翻译：

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跳出框框思考：从早期神经生物学变异性看大脑-双语关系

双语制代表了一种研究大脑和行为之间相互作用的独特方式，也是一种研究环境因素在塑造这种关系中的作用的优雅模型。过去的神经影像学研究主要集中在双语如何影响大脑结构，以及大脑最终如何适应第二语言。在本文中，我们讨论了对该领域的最新贡献，该领域将双语视为从不同角度理解大脑行为映射的镜头。已经表明，在与双语无关的情况下，跨多个领域的认知表现可以通过产前确定的神经解剖变异来预测，并且在很大程度上不受出生后变化的影响。这里，我们讨论了新的发现，表明双语会调节这些变体对特定领域认知的预测作用。这些发现的影响可能在多个层面上产生深远影响，并强调需要塑造更复杂的问题，以促进双语认知神经科学方法的进步。