title: Neural Stimulation Has a Long-Term Effect on Foreign Vocabulary Acquisition.
abstract: Acquisition of a foreign language is a challenging task that is becoming increasingly more important in the world nowadays. There is evidence suggesting that the frontal and temporal cortices are involved in language processing and comprehension, but it is still unknown whether foreign language acquisition recruits additional cortical areas in a causal manner. For the first time, we used transcranial random noise stimulation on the frontal and parietal brain areas, in order to compare its effect on the acquisition of unknown foreign words and a sham, or placebo, condition was also included. This type of noninvasive neural stimulation enhances cortical activity by boosting the spontaneous activity of neurons. Foreign vocabulary acquisition was tested both immediately and seven days after the stimulation. We found that stimulation on the posterior parietal, but not the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or sham stimulation, significantly improved the memory performance in the long term. These results suggest that the posterior parietal cortex is directly involved in acquisition of foreign vocabulary, thus extending the "linguistic network" to this area.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Tuzla, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey ; University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK ; Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
authors.forename: Achille
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pasqualotto
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Tuzla, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey.
authors.forename: Begüm
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Kobanbay
authors.affiliation: University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK ; Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Proulx
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D065908:Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult