CRCNS US-German Research Proposal: Language representations in bilinguals

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The overarching goal of this project is to uncover how language-related information is represented andprocessed in the brains of bilinguals. To do this the project will use functional magnetic resonance imaging torecord 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 semanticinformation 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 andtreatment of language disorders, enhance methods for language education, and advance machinetranslation technologies.Over the past 10 years the project team has developed a novel and sensitive voxelwise modeling approach foranalyzing and modeling fMRI data. This approach recovers functional maps in the human cerebral cortex inunprecedented detail. The project team will use this powerful framework to study language representation in the brains ofbilingual speakers. In Aim 1 the project will compare lexical semantic information represented in cortical maps obtainedduring language comprehension in bilinguals in both German and English. In Aim 2 the project will compare syntacticinformation represented in cortical maps obtained during language comprehension in the same individualsexamined in Aim 1. In Aim 3 the project will compare cortical semantic and syntactic maps obtained during languagecomprehension in bilinguals who know two very different languages, Chinese and English. Together theseexperiments will answer several important questions about semantic representation in bilinguals: Are thefunctional representations of semantic and syntactic information similar or different across languages? What arethe similarities and differences in semantic representations across languages? How are syntactic featuresrepresented 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.