Neuroimaging using more ecologically valid stimuli such as audiobooks has advanced our understanding of natural language comprehension in the brain. However, prior naturalistic stimuli have typically been restricted to a single language, which limited generalizability beyond small typological domains. Here we present the "Le Petit Prince fMRI Corpus" (LPPC-fMRI), a multilingual resource for research in the cognitive neuroscience of speech and language during naturalistic listening (Open-Neuro: ds003643). 49 English speakers, 35 Chinese speakers and 28 French speakers listened to the same audiobook "The Little Prince" in their native language while multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging was acquired. We also provide time-aligned speech annotation and word-by-word predictors obtained using natural language processing tools. The resulting timeseries data are shown to be of high quality with good temporal signal-to-noise ratio and high inter-subject correlation. Data-driven functional analyses provide further evidence of data quality. This annotated, multilingual fMRI dataset facilitates future re-analysis that addresses cross-linguistic commonalities and differences in the neural substrate of language processing on multiple perceptual and linguistic levels.
Ambulatory electrocardiogram (AECG) is widely used for heart disease diagnosis and treatment after surgery, but the signal quality will be negatively affected by the motion artifact (MA)
Are the brain bases of language comprehension the same across all human languages, or do these bases vary in a way that corresponds to differences in linguistic typology? English and Mandarin Chinese attest such a typological difference in the domain of relative clauses. Using fMRI with English and Chinese participants, who listened to the same translation-equivalent story, we analyzed neuroimages time-aligned to object-extracted relative clauses in both languages. In a GLM analysis of these naturalistic data, comprehension was selectively associated with increased hemodynamic activity in left posterior temporal lobe, angular gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex in both languages. This result suggests the processing of object-extracted relative clauses is subserved by a common collection of brain regions, regardless of typology. However, there were also regions that were activated uniquely in our Chinese participants albeit not to a significantly greater degree. These were in the temporal lobe. These Chinese-specific results could reflect structural ambiguity-resolution work that must be done in Chinese but not English ORCs.
Words can occur arbitrarily far away from where they contribute their meaning in a sentence. Two examples are WH-questions (WHQs), which begin with a WH-word like what and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs), in which a noun is modified by a sentence-like grammatical unit. While these long-distance dependencies have been extensively studied, never before have their brain bases been examined from a multi-lingual, naturalistic perspective. This study fills this gap by analyzing WHQs and ORCs in fMRI data collected while 35 Chinese participants (15 females) and 49 English participants (30 females) listen to translation-equivalent stories. These languages exhibit radical typological differences in word order in these constructions. It remains unknown whether the brain basis for comprehension in these languages is similar or different. Separate general linear model analyses were performed and voxel-level intersections were calculated between the results to identify common regions of selectively increased activation during the comprehension of these linguistic constructions. Further Bayesian region of interest analyses probed whether common increases were truly similar. We found remarkable cross-linguistic commonality for both constructions. WHQs were associated with increased activation in the left middle and superior temporal lobe, left temporoparietal junction, left inferior frontal gyrus, and bilateral medial frontal lobe. ORCs were associated with increased activation in the left middle temporal lobe, left inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus, bilateral posterior cingulate, bilateral precuneus, and left medial frontal lobe. These results support the hypothesis that, regardless of form, the brain bases of higher-level language processing are uniform across languages.
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