Van Rinsveld Amandine, Dricot Laurence, Guillaume Mathieu, Rossion Bruno, Schiltz Christine
Institute of Cognitive Science and Assessment, Education, Culture, Cognition and Society research unit, University of Luxembourg, Campus Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
Institute Of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2017 Jul 1;101:17-29. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.05.009. Epub 2017 May 8.
How do bilinguals solve arithmetic problems in each of their languages? We investigated this question by exploring the neural substrates of mental arithmetic in bilinguals. Critically, our population was composed of a homogeneous group of adults who were fluent in both of their instruction languages (i.e., German as first instruction language and French as second instruction language). Twenty bilinguals were scanned with fMRI (3T) while performing mental arithmetic. Both simple and complex problems were presented to disentangle memory retrieval occuring in very simple problems from arithmetic computation occuring in more complex problems. In simple additions, the left temporal regions were more activated in German than in French, whereas no brain regions showed additional activity in the reverse constrast. Complex additions revealed the reverse pattern, since the activations of regions for French surpassed the same computations in German and the extra regions were located predominantly in occipital regions. Our results thus highlight that highly proficient bilinguals rely on differential activation patterns to solve simple and complex additions in each of their languages, suggesting different solving procedures. The present study confirms the critical role of language in arithmetic problem solving and provides novel insights into how highly proficient bilinguals solve arithmetic problems.
双语者如何用他们的每种语言解决算术问题？我们通过探究双语者心算的神经基础来研究这个问题。关键的是，我们的研究对象是一组在两种教学语言（即作为第一教学语言的德语和作为第二教学语言的法语）上都流利的成年人。20名双语者在进行心算时接受了功能磁共振成像（3T）扫描。呈现了简单和复杂的问题，以区分非常简单问题中发生的记忆检索和更复杂问题中发生的算术计算。在简单加法中，左颞叶区域在德语中比在法语中激活更强，而在相反对比中没有脑区显示出额外活动。复杂加法显示出相反的模式，因为法语区域的激活超过了德语中相同计算的激活，额外区域主要位于枕叶区域。因此，我们的结果突出表明，高度熟练的双语者依靠不同的激活模式用他们的每种语言解决简单和复杂加法问题，这表明存在不同的解决程序。本研究证实了语言在解决算术问题中的关键作用，并为高度熟练的双语者如何解决算术问题提供了新的见解。
