Brain correlates of sentence translation in Finnish???Norwegian bilinguals

Abstract

We measured brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while Finnish-Norwegian bilinguals silently translated sentences from Finnish into Norwegian and decided whether a later presented probe sentence was a correct translation of the original sentence. The control task included silent sentence reading and probe sentence decision within a single language, Finnish. The translation minus control task contrast activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 47) and the left basal ganglia. The left inferior frontal activation appears to be related to active semantic retrieval and the basal ganglia activation to a general action control function that works by suppressing competing responses.

Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control

“…Price and colleagues (1999) attributed this to the need for greater coordination of mental operations for translation, during which the direct cerebral pathways for naming words must be inhibited, in favour of less automated circuits. The involvement of subcortical structures along with activity in the left prefrontal cortex was also reported by Lehtonen et al (2005) during sentence translation. Such results provide good evidence for the involvement of subcortical structures in tasks special to bilinguals.…”

Brain functional plasticity associated with the emergence of expertise in extreme language control

“…Neuroimaging studies of translation have also implicated basal ganglia structures including the putamen and caudate nucleus (Price et al, 1999), and the external globus pallidus (Lehtonen et al, 2005). Neuropsychological reports of cases of subcortical polyglot aphasia converge with findings of neuroimaging studies, with evidence for a role for the dorsal striatum in language control.…”

“…The evidence from both lesion studies (for example Abutalebi et al, 2000Abutalebi et al, , 2009 and functional imaging of bilingual language control (Abutalebi and Green, 2008;Garbin et al, 2010;Klein et al, 1994Klein et al, , 1995Klein et al, , 2006Lehtonen et al, 2005;Price et al, 1999) has tended to suggest that this function of the basal ganglia is left-lateralized. However, a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of language switching indicates that both right and left striatal structures are implicated in language switching .…”

Translating with an Injured Brain: Neurolinguistic Aspects of Translation as Revealed by Bilinguals with Cerebral Lesions

“…Also, the frontobasal crossed aphasic described by García-Caballero, García-Lado et al (2007) was capable of translating words but not sentences. Furthermore, the only two neuroimaging studies on sentence translation recording the whole brain revealed distinctive activation increases in frontal (but not in posterior) regions (Lehtonen, Laine et al 2005;HervaisAdelman, Moser-Mercer et al 2011).…”

“…These approaches have focused on neuroimaging evidence. For instance, studies using high-spatial-resolution techniques (e.g., fMRI, PET) suggest that translation processes, irrespective of the translation unit, (i) predominantly engage the left hemisphere (LH) (Klein, Milner et al 1995;Price, Green et al 1999;Lehtonen, Laine et al 2005; Hervais-Adelman, Moser-Mercer et al 2011), (ii) always generate distinct activity in Broca's area (García 2013), and (iii) elicit wider activation patterns for forward than backward translation (Klein, Milner et al 1995;Rinne, Tommola et al 2000;Quaresima, Ferrari et al 2002; see also Price, Green et al 1999).…”