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Neural Correlates of Proficiency in Early Bilinguals

早期双语者熟练程度的神经相关性

基本信息

批准号：
7193410
负责人：
Arturo E Hernandez
金额：
$ 7.21万
依托单位：
UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2006
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2006-03-01 至 2009-02-28
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Why do bilinguals selectively lose access to a language after neurological insult? Research in bilingual aphasia and more recent research using neuroimaging tools has found that both age of second language acquisition (AoA) and proficiency play a role in the neural representation of two languages. The current proposal is designed to extend this seminal work in two important directions. First, the work will look at early Spanish-English bilinguals, a group of participants who have been vastly understudied in both the behavioral and neuroimaging literature. Participants will be matched on English proficiency but will be placed in two groups which have either low or high proficiency in Spanish. They will be asked to make grammaticality judgments for two-word phrases or short sentences which have subject-verb agreement, number or grammatical gender violations. These represent a test of the neural correlates associated with morphological (the plural marking 's') violations in each language. Second, the proposed project will look at the influence of cross-language overlap (i.e. functions which transfer from one language to the other easily) on the differences across groups, a factor which has not been systematically manipulated in published fMRI research to date. Our hypothesis is that language proficiency and overlap will modulate neural activity. Cross-language differences in neural activity should be larger for low proficiency subjects than for high proficiency subjects. Increased activity will be observed for functions which do not overlap. This increased activity will be larger for low proficiency subjects. Finally, a group of monolingual Spanish speakers will be tested to insure that any differences between grammatical functions are not due to a difference in difficulty. The difference in the pattern of activity across groups and languages will provide insight into the cognitive mechanisms that are necessary to process morphological information in a less proficient language.

描述（由申请人提供）：为什么双语者在神经损伤后会选择性地失去语言能力？双语失语症的研究和最近使用神经成像工具的研究发现，第二语言习得年龄（AoA）和熟练程度在两种语言的神经表征中发挥作用。目前的建议旨在将这一开创性工作扩大到两个重要方向。首先，这项工作将着眼于早期的西班牙语-英语双语者，这是一组在行为和神经成像文献中都被大量研究的参与者。参加者将根据英语水平进行匹配，但将被分为两组，其中一组的西班牙语水平较低，另一组较高。他们将被要求对主谓一致、数字或语法性别违规的两词短语或短句进行语法判断。这些代表了与每种语言中的形态（复数标记“s”）违规相关的神经相关性的测试。第二，拟议的项目将着眼于跨语言重叠（即从一种语言转移到另一种语言的功能）对跨群体差异的影响，这是一个迄今为止尚未在已发表的功能磁共振成像研究中系统地操纵的因素。我们的假设是，语言熟练度和重叠将调节神经活动。神经活动的跨语言差异应该是更大的低水平的科目比高水平的科目。对于不重叠的职能，将观察到活动增加。对于低熟练度受试者，这种增加的活动将更大。最后，将对一组单语西班牙语使用者进行测试，以确保语法功能之间的任何差异不是由于难度的差异。不同群体和不同语言之间的活动模式差异，将有助于我们深入了解在不太熟练的语言中处理形态信息所必需的认知机制。