The brain mechanisms underlying lexical processing in bilingual individuals are regulated by both language distance and task requirements.

Whether bilingual individuals use the same brain mechanisms for processing their native language (L1) and second language (L2) is a question that has attracted widespread attention among researchers. Existing studies have provided a wealth of evidence, but there are also discrepancies in the findings. The main reasons for these inconsistencies lie in the linguistic distance between the native language and the second language, as well as differences in the tasks used in the experiments. This study utilizes meta-analysis to examine brain activation patterns when bilingual individuals process vocabulary from L1 and L2 in different tasks (phonetic, semantic). The results show that in phonetic tasks, bilingual individuals with a greater linguistic distance between their L1 and L2 tend to utilize more resources for processing L2 words.