Neural Correlates of Proficiency in Early Bilinguals

早期双语者熟练程度的神经相关性

• 批准号: 7103942
• 负责人: Arturo E Hernandez
• 金额: $ 7.43万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-03-01 至 2008-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7103942
• 关键词: Hispanic Americans; aphasia; behavioral /social science research tag; bioimaging /biomedical imaging; brain mapping; clinical research; differential semantics; early experience; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human subject; language development; multilingualism; neural information processing; neuroimaging; neuropsychology; nonEnglish language; psychological tests; questionnaires; university student; verbal behavior; verbal learning; vocabulary

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侮辱后有选择地失去对语言的访问？双语失语症的研究以及使用神经影像工具的最新研究发现，第二语言获取年龄（AOA）和熟练程度都在两种语言的神经代表性中发挥作用。当前的建议旨在将此开创性的工作扩展到两个重要方向。首先，这项工作将研究早期的西班牙语双语者，这是一群参与者，他们在行为和神经影像学文学中都经过了大量研究。参与者将以英语水平进行匹配，但将分为两组，这些小组的西班牙语水平较低或熟练。他们将被要求对两个单词短语或短句话做出语法判断，这些短语或具有主题的一致性，数字或语法性别违反的句子。这些代表了每种语言中与形态学（复数标记“ S”）相关的神经相关的测试。其次，拟议的项目将研究跨语言重叠的影响（即轻松从一种语言转移到另一种语言的功能）对群体之间的差异的影响，这一因素尚未在迄今已发表的FMRI研究中系统地操纵。我们的假设是语言水平和重叠将调节神经活动。 对于低能力受试者，与高能力受试者相比，神经活动的跨语言差异应大。对于不重叠的功能，将观察到活动增加。对于低能力受试者，这种增加的活动将更大。最后，将测试一组单语的西班牙语者，以确保语法功能之间的任何差异并不是由于难度的差异。 跨群体和语言的活动模式的差异将提供对以少熟练语言处理形态学信息所必需的认知机制的见解。