Language-specific activations in the brain: Evidence from inflectional processing in bilinguals

被引:26
作者
Lehtonen, Minna [1 ,2 ,3 ]
Vorobyev, Victor [3 ]
Soveri, Anna [2 ,3 ]
Hugdahl, Kenneth [4 ]
Tuokkola, Terhi [5 ]
Laine, Matti [2 ,3 ]
机构
[1] Univ Helsinki, Helsinki Coll Adv Studies, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland
[2] Abo Akad Univ, Dept Psychol, Turku, Finland
[3] Univ Turku, Ctr Cognit Neurosci, SF-20500 Turku, Finland
[4] Univ Bergen, Dept Biol & Med Psychol, N-5020 Bergen, Norway
[5] Univ Turku, Dept Radiol, SF-20500 Turku, Finland
关键词
Inflectional processing; Brain imaging; fMRI; Bilinguals; MORPHOLOGICALLY RICH LANGUAGE; WORD FORM AREA; COMPLEX WORDS; FUSIFORM GYRUS; LEXICAL ACCESS; FMRI; FREQUENCY; RECOGNITION; NOUNS; VERBS;
D O I
10.1016/j.jneuroling.2009.05.001
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
We investigated the neural correlates of morphological processing in two structurally different languages within the same individuals. An interesting contrast is provided by Finnish and Swedish where most inflected Finnish nouns tend to show a processing cost (i.e., longer reaction times and higher error rates) compared to monomorphemic nouns, while most inflected Swedish nouns do not show such a cost. This has been taken as evidence for morphological decomposition in Finnish and full-form recognition of inflected nouns in Swedish. While most previous imaging studies had studied the two morphological processing routes (decomposition and storage) within the same language and often by comparing regular vs. irregular forms, we employed a cross-language setting and a direct contrast between morphologically complex vs. simple words. We subjected high-proficient Finnish-Swedish early bilinguals to a visual lexical decision task with inflected vs. monomorphemic Finnish and Swedish nouns while measuring their brain activation by fMRI. The participants showed an inflectional processing cost and related left fronto-temporal activation increases in Finnish but not in Swedish. This suggests a language-specific processing difference in the brain, possibly reflecting the structural difference between these two languages. In addition, the activations appeared in regions related to lexical-semantic and syntactic processing rather than visual word form processing. This is in line with previous studies in Finnish, suggesting that the morphological processing cost stems primarily from the later, semantic-syntactic stage. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:495 / 513
页数:19
相关论文
共 62 条
[1]   Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control [J].
Abutalebi, Jubin ;
Green, David .
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS, 2007, 20 (03) :242-275
[2]  
AHLSEN E, 1994, NORDIC J LINGUISTICS, V17, P61
[3]   Frequency effects and the representational status of regular inflections [J].
Alegre, M ;
Gordon, P .
JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE, 1999, 40 (01) :41-61
[4]   Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route modes [J].
Baayen, RH ;
Dijkstra, T ;
Schreuder, R .
JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE, 1997, 37 (01) :94-117
[5]   An ER-fMRI investigation of morphological inflection in German reveals that the brain makes a distinction between regular and irregular forms [J].
Beretta, A ;
Campbell, C ;
Carr, TH ;
Huang, J ;
Schmitt, LM ;
Christianson, K ;
Cao, Y .
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE, 2003, 85 (01) :67-92
[6]   Neural correlates of morphological processes in Hebrew [J].
Bick, Atira ;
Goelman, Gadi ;
Frost, Ram .
JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, 2008, 20 (03) :406-420
[7]   The problem of functional localization in the human brain [J].
Brett, M ;
Johnsrude, IS ;
Owen, AM .
NATURE REVIEWS NEUROSCIENCE, 2002, 3 (03) :243-249
[8]  
Butterworth B., 1983, LANGUAGE PRODUCTION, V2, P257
[9]   Neural responses to morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of single words: An fMRI study [J].
Davis, MH ;
Meunier, F ;
Marslen-Wilson, WD .
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE, 2004, 89 (03) :439-449
[10]   The visual word form area: a prelexical representation of visual words in the fusiform gyrus [J].
Dehaene, S ;
Le Clec'H, G ;
Poline, JB ;
Le Bihan, D ;
Cohen, L .
NEUROREPORT, 2002, 13 (03) :321-325