Native and non-native reading of sentences: An fMRI experiment

Abstract

The processing of syntactic and semantic information in written sentences by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers was investigated in an fMRI experiment. This was done by means of a violation paradigm, in which participants read sentences containing either a syntactic, a semantic, or no violation. The results of this study were compared to those of a previous fMRI study, in which auditory sentence processing in L1 and L2 was investigated. The results indicate greater activation for L2 speakers as compared to L1 speakers when reading sentences in several language-and motor-related brain regions. The processing of syntactically incorrect sentences elicited no reliably greater activation in language areas in L2 speakers. In L1 speakers, on the other hand, syntactic processing, as compared to semantic processing, was associated with increased activation in left mid to posterior superior temporal gyrus. In response to the processing of semantically incorrect sentences, both L2 and L1 speakers demonstrated increased involvement of left inferior frontal gyrus. The results of this study were compared to a previously conducted fMRI study, which made use of identical sentence stimuli in the auditory modality. Results from the two studies are in general agreement with one another, although some differences in the response of brain areas very proximal to primary perceptual processing areas (i.e. primary auditory and visual cortex) were observed in conjunction with presentation in the different modalities. The combined results provide evidence that L1 and L2 speakers rely on the same cortical network to process language, although with a higher level of activation in some regions for L2 processing. D

An fMRI study on the processing of long-distance wh-movement in a second language

“…This suggestion is akin to the evidence presented in Suh et al (2007: Figure 4), where the participants did not show differences in LIFG activity between sentences with central embedding compared to conjoined sentences of the same length. Rather than the absence of an increase for embedded sentences, the lack of a statistical difference appeared to be driven by similar increase in LIFG activity for conjoined sentences, which was higher than that for L1 processing (see also Rüschemeyer, Zysset & Friederici 2006, for regions showing increased activation for L2 vs. L1 sentence processing). Another possiblity for the absence of LIFG effects may lie with its purported role in the integration of semantic information during sentence processing (Friederici 2012;Hagoort 2014).…”

Embodied language in first- and second-language speakers: Neural correlates of processing motor verbs

“…It is unclear, though, whether L2 speakers display the same kind of embodiment effects as L1 speakers, as hardly any study has addressed this issue. A number of fMRI studies have looked into semantic processing in bilinguals (Chee, Hon, Lee, & Soon, 2001;Illes et al, 1999;Isel, Baumgaertner, Thrän, Meisel, & Büchel, 2010;Rüschemeyer, Zysset, & Friederici, 2006;Wartenburger et al, 2003). However, none of these systematically manipulated motor-relatedness, for example by including a contrast between motor and non-motor words or between different types of motor words, thus precluding any conclusions as to the embodied nature of L2 semantic representations.…”

The anterior left inferior frontal gyrus contributes to semantic unification

“…In the violation detection task (Ni et al, 2000), semantic processing may terminate earlier in the incongruent condition than in the congruent condition due to a specific reading strategy (Huang et al, 2012;Zhu et al, 2009). Although activation in the LIFG has been reported in a wide range of tasks, including semantic congruency judgment (Constable et al, 2004;Rueschemeyer et al, 2006;Zhu et al, 2009), meaningfulness rating (Humphries et al, 2007), reading for comprehension (Hagoort et al, 2004;Tesink et al, 2009), comprehension probe test (Just et al, 1996;Mason and Just, 2007;Newman et al, 2009;Ye and Zhou, 2009), priming (Devauchelle et al, 2009), and violation detection (Ni et al, 2000), it has been suggested that these tasks all involve explicit attentional control (Crinion et al, 2003;Van Petten and Luka, 2006). It is possible that such control processes may interact with semantic unification and constitute an alternative explanation for the LIFG activations observed in these studies.…”