Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China.
School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2021 Mar;42(4):893-907. doi: 10.1002/hbm.25266. Epub 2020 Oct 28.
How native and non-native languages are represented in the brain is one of the most important questions in neurolinguistics. Much research has found that the similarity in neural activity of native and non-native languages are influenced by factors such as age of acquisition, language proficiency, and language exposure in the non-native language. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how the similarity between native and non-native languages in orthographic transparency, a key factor that affects the cognitive and neural mechanisms of phonological access, modulates the cross-language similarity in neural activation and which brain regions show the modulatory effects of language distance in orthographic transparency. To address these questions, the present study used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to precisely estimate the neural pattern similarity between native language and two non-native languages in Uyghur-Chinese-English trilinguals, whose third language (i.e., English) was more similar to the native language (i.e., Uyghur) in orthography than to their second language (i.e., Chinese). Behavioral results revealed that subjects responded faster to words in the non-native language with more similar orthography to their native language in the word naming task. More importantly, RSA revealed greater neural pattern similarity between Uyghur and English than between Uyghur and Chinese in select brain areas for phonological processing, especially in the left hemisphere. Further analysis confirmed that those brain regions represented phonological information. These results provide direct neuroimaging evidence for the modulatory effect of language distance in orthographic transparency on cross-language pattern similarity between native and non-native languages during word reading.
母语和非母语在大脑中的表现形式是神经语言学中最重要的问题之一。大量研究发现，母语和非母语的神经活动相似性受到习得年龄、语言熟练程度和非母语语言接触等因素的影响。然而，目前仍不清楚在影响语音获取认知和神经机制的关键因素——正字法透明度方面，母语和非母语之间的相似性如何调节跨语言神经激活的相似性，以及哪些大脑区域表现出正字法透明度方面语言距离的调节效应。为了解决这些问题，本研究采用了表象相似性分析（RSA）来精确估计维吾尔语-汉语-英语三语者中母语和两种非母语语言之间的神经模式相似性，他们的第三语言（即英语）在正字法上与母语（即维吾尔语）比与第二语言（即汉语）更相似。行为结果表明，在命名任务中，被试对与母语正字法更相似的非母语单词的反应更快。更重要的是，RSA 揭示了在语音处理的特定大脑区域，维吾尔语和英语之间的神经模式相似性大于维吾尔语和汉语之间的相似性，尤其是在左半球。进一步的分析证实了这些大脑区域代表了语音信息。这些结果为正字法透明度方面语言距离对阅读过程中母语和非母语之间跨语言模式相似性的调节效应提供了直接的神经影像学证据。
