Nouns and verbs are fundamental grammatical building blocks of all languages. Studies of brain-damaged patients and healthy individuals have demonstrated that verb processing can be dissociated from noun processing at a neuroanatomical level. In cases where bilingual patients have a noun or verb deficit, the deficit has been observed in both languages. This suggests that the noun-verb distinction may be based on neural components that are common across languages. Here we investigated the cortical organization of grammatical categories in healthy, early Spanish-English bilinguals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a morphophonological alternation task. Four regions showed greater activity for verbs than for nouns in both languages: left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LMTG), left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG), pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), and right middle occipital gyrus (RMOG); no regions showed greater activation for nouns. Multi-voxel pattern analysis within verb-specific regions showed indistinguishable activity patterns for English and Spanish, indicating language-invariant bilingual processing. In LMTG and LMFG, patterns were more similar within than across grammatical category, both within and across languages, indicating language-invariant grammatical class information. These results suggest that the neural substrates underlying verb-specific processing are largely independent of language in bilinguals, both at the macroscopic neuroanatomical level and at the level of voxel activity patterns.
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Titolo: | Language-invariant verb processing regions in Spanish-English bilinguals. | |
Autori: | J. L., Willms; K. A., Shapiro; Peelen, Marius Vincent; P. E., Pajtas; A., Costa; L. R., Moo; Caramazza, Alfonso | |
Autori Unitn: | ||
Titolo del periodico: | NEUROIMAGE | |
Anno di pubblicazione: | 2011 | |
Numero e parte del fascicolo: | 1 | |
Codice identificativo Scopus: | 2-s2.0-0021515387 | |
Codice identificativo Pubmed: | 21515387 | |
Codice identificativo WOS: | WOS:000291624100029 | |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.04.021 | |
Handle: | http://hdl.handle.net/11572/91103 | |
Appare nelle tipologie: | 03.1 Articolo su rivista (Journal article) |