This neuroimaging study investigates how bilingual brains process multiple languages, focusing on the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis. The study scanned Chinese-English bilinguals during an implicit reading task involving Chinese words, English words, and Chinese pinyin. Results revealed broad cortical regions with interdigitated neural populations supporting the same cognitive components across languages, indicating regional-level functional assimilation supported by voxel-wise anatomical accommodation. The findings verify the functional independence of neural representations of different languages while showing co-representation of both languages in most language regions, revealing linguistic-feature specific accommodation and assimilation between first and second languages.
Publisher
Communications Biology
Published On
Jan 25, 2023
Authors
Shujie Geng, Wanwan Guo, Edmund T. Rolls, Kunyu Xu, Tianye Jia, Wei Zhou, Colin Blakemore, Li-Hai Tan, Miao Cao, Jianfeng Feng
Tags
bilingualism
neuroimaging
cognitive processes
language representation
assimilation
accommodation
Chinese-English
Related Publications
Explore these studies to deepen your understanding of the subject.