A Shared Neural Mechanism for Abstract Grammatical Computations across Languages in Bilinguals

Abstract

A central question in cognitive neuroscience is how the brain implements abstract computations that must generalize across superficially different inputs. Language provides a strong test case: the same grammatical operation, such as pluralization, can be realized through distinct rules and forms across languages. Whether such transformations rely on language-specific neural systems or on abstract mechanisms that generalize across linguistic contexts remains unresolved. Crucially, these transformations must be computed online and integrated into speech planning within a tightly constrained time window. Using magnetoencephalography, we tracked the millisecond dynamics of grammatical word-form transformations during seminaturalistic phrase completion in humans of both sexes. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals produced singular and plural noun forms in both languages in a design that fully orthogonalized semantic number, phonological changes, grammatical inflection, and produced language. Adjusting words to fit their grammatical context engaged a left-lateralized frontotemporal network beginning ∼100 ms after cue onset. Multivariate decoding revealed that the neural patterns supporting this computation generalized across languages, across different surface plural forms, and to pseudowords, demonstrating that abstractly equivalent operations are instantiated in the same neural substrates despite differences in linguistic form. Together, these findings provide time-resolved neural evidence for a language-general computational mechanism, showing that the brain implements grammatical transformations as abstract, generative operations. More broadly, they show how bilingualism can be used to probe general principles of neural organization, revealing how abstract computations may be shared and reused across representational systems.