Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York, NY, 10031, USA.
Department of Physics, Graduate Center of City University of New York, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 May 19;11(1):10568. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-90151-4.
Bilingualism requires control of multiple language systems, and may lead to architectural differences in language networks obtained from clinical fMRI tasks. Emerging connectivity metrics such as k-core may capture these differences, highlighting crucial network components based on resiliency. We investigated the influence of bilingualism on clinical fMRI language tasks and characterized bilingual networks using connectivity metrics to provide a patient care benchmark. Sixteen right-handed subjects (mean age 42-years; nine males) without neurological history were included: eight native English-speaking monolinguals and eight native Spanish-speaking (L1) bilinguals with acquired English (L2). All subjects underwent fMRI with gold-standard clinical language tasks. Starting from active clusters on fMRI, we inferred the persistent functional network across subjects and ran centrality measures to characterize differences. Our results demonstrated a persistent network "core" consisting of Broca's area, the pre-supplementary motor area, and the premotor area. K-core analysis showed that Wernicke's area was engaged by the "core" with weaker connection in L2 than L1.
双语能力需要控制多种语言系统，并且可能导致从临床 fMRI 任务中获得的语言网络的结构差异。新兴的连通性指标（如 k 核）可能会捕捉到这些差异，根据弹性突出关键网络组件。我们研究了双语能力对临床 fMRI 语言任务的影响，并使用连通性指标来描述双语网络，为患者护理提供基准。纳入了 16 名右利手受试者（平均年龄 42 岁；9 名男性），无神经病史：8 名母语为英语的单语者和 8 名母语为西班牙语（L1）的后天英语使用者（L2）双语者。所有受试者均接受了具有金标准临床语言任务的 fMRI 检查。从 fMRI 的活跃聚类开始，我们推断了跨受试者的持久功能网络，并运行了中心性度量来描述差异。我们的结果表明存在一个由布罗卡区、补充运动前区和运动前区组成的持久网络“核心”。K 核分析表明，Wernicke 区与 L2 相比，与“核心”的连接较弱。
