Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Center for Studies of Psychological Application, and School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Department of Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine, California, USA.
Neuroscience. 2019 Jul 1;410:254-263. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.05.019. Epub 2019 May 17.
Previous studies have found that native Chinese speakers recruit the bilateral fusiform gyrus to read English words, in the same manner as they read Chinese words (i.e., the assimilation process). In this study, we quantified the neural pattern similarity between native (L1) and second languages (L2) by using representational similarity analysis (RSA), and examined the modulatory effects of L2 proficiency on cross-language neural pattern similarity (PS) in the bilateral fusiform cortex. Results showed that, for Chinese-English bilinguals, higher reading proficiency in L2 was associated with greater cross-language PS in the left fusiform gyrus, but with lower PS in the right fusiform gyrus. These results suggest that, as L2 proficiency increases, the assimilation process is enhanced in the region for word reading (left fusiform gyrus), but reduced in the region for nonlinguistic processing (right fusiform gyrus).
先前的研究发现，以汉语为母语的人在阅读英语单词时会像阅读中文单词一样，激活双侧梭状回（fusiform gyrus），即同化过程。本研究通过表示相似性分析（representational similarity analysis，RSA）量化了母语（L1）和第二语言（L2）之间的神经模式相似性，并考察了第二语言熟练度对双侧梭状回跨语言神经模式相似性（PS）的调制作用。结果表明，对于汉英双语者，L2 阅读熟练度越高，左侧梭状回的跨语言 PS 越大，但右侧梭状回的 PS 越低。这些结果表明，随着第二语言熟练度的提高，阅读单词的区域（左侧梭状回）的同化过程增强，但非语言处理区域（右侧梭状回）的同化过程减弱。
