Facultad de Educación, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Neuropsychologia. 2021 Jan 8;150:107703. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107703. Epub 2020 Dec 9.
We investigated the neural basis of newly learned words in Spanish as a mother tongue (L1) and English as a second language (L2). Participants acquired new names for real but unfamiliar concepts in both languages over the course of two days. On day 3, they completed a semantic categorization task during fMRI scanning. The results revealed largely overlapping brain regions for newly learned words in Spanish and English. However, Spanish showed a heightened BOLD response within prefrontal cortex (PFC), due to increased competition of existing lexical representations. In contrast, English displayed higher activity than Spanish within primary auditory cortex, which suggests increased phonological processing due to more irregular phonological-orthographic mappings. Overall, these results suggest that novel words are learned similarly in Spanish L1 and English L2, and that they are represented in largely overlapping brain regions. However, they differ in terms of cognitive control and phonological processes.
我们研究了母语西班牙语和第二语言英语中新学习单词的神经基础。参与者在两天的时间里分别用这两种语言学习了新的、真实但不熟悉的概念的名称。在第 3 天，他们在 fMRI 扫描期间完成了语义分类任务。结果显示，西班牙语和英语中新学习单词的大脑区域基本重叠。然而，由于现有词汇表征的竞争加剧，西班牙语在额前皮质（PFC）内显示出更高的 BOLD 反应。相比之下，英语在初级听觉皮层内的活动高于西班牙语，这表明由于更不规则的语音-拼写映射，语音处理增加。总的来说，这些结果表明，在西班牙语 L1 和英语 L2 中，新单词的学习方式相似，并且它们在很大程度上重叠的大脑区域中得到表示。然而，它们在认知控制和语音处理方面存在差异。
