Journal
NEUROIMAGE
Volume 57, Issue 1, Pages 251-261Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.04.021
Keywords
Grammatical class; Bilingualism; Verbs; fMRI; MVPA
Funding
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health [R01 DC006842]
- Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Programme [CSD2007-00012, PS12008-01191]
- ICREA Funding Source: Custom
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Nouns and verbs are fundamental grammatical building blocks of all languages. Studies of brain-damaged patients and healthy individuals have demonstrated that verb processing can be dissociated from noun processing at a neuroanatomical level. In cases where bilingual patients have a noun or verb deficit, the deficit has been observed in both languages. This suggests that the noun-verb distinction may be based on neural components that are common across languages. Here we investigated the cortical organization of grammatical categories in healthy, early Spanish-English bilinguals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a morphophonological alternation task. Four regions showed greater activity for verbs than for nouns in both languages: left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LMTG), left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG), pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and right middle occipital gyrus (RMOG); no regions showed greater activation for nouns. Multi-voxel pattern analysis within verb-specific regions showed indistinguishable activity patterns for English and Spanish, indicating language-invariant bilingual processing. In LMTG and LMFG, patterns were more similar within than across grammatical category, both within and across languages, indicating language-invariant grammatical class information. These results suggest that the neural substrates underlying verb-specific processing are largely independent of language in bilinguals, both at the macroscopic neuroanatomical level and at the level of voxel activity patterns. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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