Processing of Visually Presented Sentences in Mandarin and English Studied with fMRI (original) (raw)

. However, it remains unclear whether these lexicons are spatially segregated within the brain. The case for anatomically segregated lexicons is suggested * Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory by clinical case studies of individuals who experience Singapore General Hospital dissociated language loss following brain damage (Al-Singapore 169856 bert and Obler, 1978) as well some data from electrical † Department of Social Work and Psychology stimulation of the brain (Ojemann and Whitaker, 1978; National University of Singapore ). An alternative explanation for the Singapore 119260 loss or preferential recovery of one language in a bilin- ‡ Neuropsychology Laboratory gual postulates disruption of a control system that allo-Department of Neurology cates resources to one or the other language (Green, 1986; Massachusetts General Hospital Paradis, 1998). Under this framework, spatially segre-Boston, Massachusetts 02114 gated lexicons are not required to explain dissociated § Department of Radiology language loss or recovery. University of Freiburg Neuroimaging studies of language function in healthy D79106 Freiburg bilingual subjects have sought to demonstrate neural Federal Republic of Germany substrates responsible for bilingual language processing. Department of Psychology However, the work to date has yielded conflicting re-University of Kent sults. At the single word level, several studies report Canterbury CT27LZ overlapping activations in two languages (Klein et al., United Kingdom 1994, 1995; Chee et al., 1999), whereas, at the sentence level, intrahemispheric differences in left hemisphere activations as well as occasional interhemispheric dif-Summary ferences have been reported (Mazoyer et al., 1993; Perani et al., 1996; Dehaene et al., 1997; Kim et al., 1997).