In my presentation I will discuss some recent findings from a series of fMRI studies in English monolinguals and Dutch-English bilinguals on the processing of interlingual homographs. These results will be compared with the claims of Paulesu et al. in their Nature paper on a cultural effect on brain function (2000), in which the processing of Italian and English orthography was contrasted. The discussion will focus on the nature and control of single word processing by the bilingual brain.