Max Planck Partner Group, School of International Chinese Language Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Brain Lang. 2024 Sep;256:105458. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2024.105458. Epub 2024 Aug 27.
This study investigated the causal enhancing effect of transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM) over the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) on syntactically complex Mandarin Chinese first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing performances. Two (L1 and L2) groups of participants (thirty per group) were recruited to receive the double-blind, sham-controlled tPBM intervention via LIFG, followed by the sentence processing, the verbal working memory (WM), and the visual WM tasks. Results revealed a consistent pattern for both groups: (a) tPBM enhanced sentence processing performance but not verbal WM for linear processing of unstructured sequences and visual WM performances; (b) Participants with lower sentence processing performances under sham tPBM benefited more from active tPBM. Taken together, the current study substantiated that tPBM enhanced L1 and L2 sentence processing, and would serve as a promising and cost-effective noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) tool for future applications on upregulating the human language faculty.
本研究调查了经颅光生物调节（tPBM）对左侧额下回（LIFG）的因果增强效应，对汉语母语（L1）和第二语言（L2）句法复杂句子处理表现的影响。两组（L1 和 L2）参与者（每组 30 人）被招募接受 LIFG 的双盲、假对照 tPBM 干预，随后进行句子处理、言语工作记忆（WM）和视觉 WM 任务。结果显示两组出现一致的模式：（a）tPBM 增强了句子处理表现，但对非结构序列的线性处理和视觉 WM 表现没有增强言语 WM；（b）在假 tPBM 下句子处理表现较低的参与者从积极 tPBM 中获益更多。总的来说，本研究证实了 tPBM 增强了 L1 和 L2 的句子处理，并且可以作为一种有前途和具有成本效益的非侵入性脑刺激（NIBS）工具，用于未来增强人类语言能力的应用。
