Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
J Neurosci. 2012 Oct 31;32(44):15277-83. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1800-12.2012.
How similar are the brains of listeners who hear the same content expressed in different languages? We directly compared the fMRI response time courses of English speakers and Russian speakers who listened to a real-life Russian narrative and its English translation. In the translation, we tried to preserve the content of the narrative while reducing the structural similarities across languages. The story evoked similar brain responses, invariant to the structural changes across languages, beginning just outside early auditory areas and extending through temporal, parietal, and frontal cerebral cortices. The similarity of responses across languages was nearly equal to the similarity of responses within each language group. The present results demonstrate that the human brain processes real-life information in a manner that is largely insensitive to the language in which that information is conveyed. The methods introduced here can potentially be used to quantify the transmission of meaning across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
听众在听到以不同语言表达的相同内容时，他们的大脑有多么相似？我们直接比较了英语使用者和俄语使用者的 fMRI 反应时程，他们分别听到了一段真实的俄语叙述及其英译本。在翻译中，我们尝试在保留叙述内容的同时减少语言之间的结构相似性。故事引发了相似的大脑反应，与语言之间的结构变化无关，这些反应始于早期听觉区域之外，并延伸至颞叶、顶叶和额叶大脑皮层。跨语言的反应相似性几乎与每种语言组内的反应相似性相等。本研究结果表明，人类大脑以一种在很大程度上不受信息传达语言影响的方式处理真实信息。这里介绍的方法可以潜在地用于量化跨文化和语言边界的意义传递。
