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Transcranial direct current stimulation influences bilingual language control mechanism: evidence from cross-frequency coupling

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Abstract

How to better suppress the interference from the non-target language when switching from one language to the other in bilingual production? The current study applied transcranial direct current stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to modulate language control measured by cross-frequency coupling. We found that switching to L2 was more modulated by F4–F3 alpha–beta phase-amplitude compared to switching to L1 after receiving the anodal stimulation at the language task schema phase. These findings suggest that anodal stimulation affects the selection of the target language task schema by enhancing the activation of frontal areas and facilitating the coordination between the left and the right frontal hemispheres.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Fund (31700991), Liaoning Natural Science Foundation of China (20170540579), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2017M621158), and Open Fund of Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, 116029, China

    Jing Tong, Chao Kong, Huanhuan Liu, Baike Li & Yuying He

  2. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Xin Wang

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  1. Jing Tong
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  2. Chao Kong
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  3. Xin Wang
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  4. Huanhuan Liu
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Correspondence to Huanhuan Liu.

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Tong, J., Kong, C., Wang, X. et al. Transcranial direct current stimulation influences bilingual language control mechanism: evidence from cross-frequency coupling. Cogn Neurodyn 14, 203–214 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-019-09561-w

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