Del Maschio Nicola, Sulpizio Simone, Bellini Camilla, Del Mauro Gianpaolo, Giannachi Matteo, Buga Duygu, Fedeli Davide, Perani Daniela, Abutalebi Jubin
Centre for Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics, Faculty of Psychology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2024 Aug 7;18:1392005. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2024.1392005. eCollection 2024.
Currently available data show mixed results as to whether the processing of emotional information has the same characteristics in the native (L1) as in the second language (L2) of bilinguals. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying bilinguals' emotional processing in L1 and L2 during an emotional interference task (i.e., the Emotional Stroop Task - EST). Our sample comprised proficient Italian-English bilinguals who learned their L2 during childhood mainly in instructional rather than immersive contexts. In spite of no detectable behavioural effects, we found stronger brain activations for L1 versus L2 emotional words in sectors of the posteromedial cortex involved in attention modulation, episodic memory, and affective processing. While fMRI findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a stronger emotional resonance when processing words in a native language, our overall pattern of results points to the different sensitivity of behavioural and hemodynamic responses to emotional information in the two languages of bilingual speakers.
目前可得的数据显示，关于双语者对情感信息的处理在其母语（L1）和第二语言（L2）中是否具有相同特征，结果不一。我们进行了一项功能磁共振成像（fMRI）实验，以阐明在情感干扰任务（即情感斯特鲁普任务 - EST）期间，双语者在L1和L2中进行情感处理背后的神经认知机制。我们的样本包括精通意大利语 - 英语的双语者，他们主要在儿童时期通过教学而非沉浸式环境学习L2。尽管没有可检测到的行为效应，但我们发现，在涉及注意力调节、情景记忆和情感处理的后内侧皮质区域，与L2情感词汇相比，L1情感词汇引发了更强的大脑激活。虽然fMRI的结果与在母语中处理词汇时存在更强情感共鸣的假设一致，但我们的总体结果模式表明，双语者对两种语言中情感信息的行为和血液动力学反应具有不同的敏感性。
