![]() It is not easy to determine such distance as languages may be similar in some respects and differ in other respects. ![]() Languages differ structurally to a certain degree and are thus characterized by different degrees of linguistic distance. The other most commonly spoken language family is Sino-Tibetan, with Mandarin being spoken by approximately one billion individuals ( Corballis, 2017). English is spoken by 900 million individuals, Hindi by 570 million, and Spanish by 400 million. It includes ancient languages such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit and many modern European languages (e.g., English, French, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Spanish, and Russian), but also languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent (e.g., Hindi) and in the Iranian region (e.g., Fārsí) ( Beekes, 2011). The Indo-European language family is one of the most commonly spoken languages worldwide. Language families were identified by comparing languages for linguistic features as well as analyzing genetic data and corresponding evolutionary trees of the populations speaking those languages ( Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1992 Henn et al., 2012 Reich, 2018). The following four main macrolinguistic families have been identified: (i) African and Southwest-Asian family, (ii) European and North-Asian family (including the Indo-European family), (iii) East-Asian, Southeast-Asian, and Australian family (including the Sino-Tibetan family), and (iv) American family ( Wichmann et al., 2012). They speak two or more languages ( Grosjean, 2010), which may even belong to different language families, namely, groups of languages or dialects with a common progenitor sharing a certain degree of similarity at lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic levels ( Rowe and Levine, 2018). The majority of the world population is bilingual. These preliminary results highlight the relevance of linguistic distance and call for future research to generalize findings to other language pairs and shed further light on the interaction between linguistic distance, AoA, and proficiency of L2. The Chinese group also selectively activated the parietal lobe, but this did not occur in the subgroup with high L2 proficiency. We found that, irrespective of L1-L2 distance-and to an extent-irrespective of L2 proficiency, L2 recruits brain areas supporting higher-order cognitive functions (e.g., cognitive control), although with group-specific differences (e.g., the insula region in the European group and the frontal cortex in the Chinese group). We further explored the modulatory effect of age of appropriation (AoA) and proficiency of L2. ![]() Thus, we examined L2 brain activations in two groups of participants with English as L2 and either (i) a European language (European group, n = 13 studies) or (ii) Chinese (Chinese group, n = 18 studies) as L1. In particular, we investigated how L2-related networks may change in response to linguistic distance from L1. In this quantitative meta-analysis, we used the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach to address the effects of linguistic distance between first (L1) and second (L2) languages on language-related brain activations. 3Institute of Mechanical Intelligence, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy.2Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Languages, Literature, Communication, Education, and Society, University of Udine, Udine, Italy.1Dipartimento/Unità Operativa Pasian di Prato, Scientific Institute, IRCCS E. ![]() Elisa Cargnelutti 1*, Barbara Tomasino 1 and Franco Fabbro 2,3 ![]()
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