The overarching goal of this project is to uncover how language-related information is represented and processed in the brains of bilinguals. To do this the project will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to record brain activity in bilingual subjects while they read passages of text in two different languages. These data will be analyzed and modeled using a cutting-edge approach called voxelwise modeling. The results of this study will provide crucial insights regarding how syntactic and semantic information about multiple languages are represented and organized in individual bilingual brains, and how these representations are flexibly deployed to facilitate multi-language comprehension. Improving our understanding of language representations in bilinguals will improve diagnosis and treatment of language disorders, enhance methods for language education, and advance machine translation technologies.
Over the past 10 years the project team has developed a novel and sensitive voxelwise modeling approach for analyzing and modeling fMRI data. This approach recovers functional maps in the human cerebral cortex in unprecedented detail. The project team will use this powerful framework to study language representation in the brains of bilingual speakers. In Aim 1 the project will compare lexical semantic information represented in cortical maps obtained during language comprehension in bilinguals in both German and English. In Aim 2 the project will compare syntactic information represented in cortical maps obtained during language comprehension in the same individuals examined in Aim 1. In Aim 3 the project will compare cortical semantic and syntactic maps obtained during language comprehension in bilinguals who know two very different languages, Chinese and English. Together these experiments will answer several important questions about semantic representation in bilinguals: Are the functional representations of semantic and syntactic information similar or different across languages? What are the similarities and differences in semantic representations across languages? How are syntactic features represented and how do these representations differ across languages?
A companion project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany (BMBF).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
