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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 15, 1999, 19(8):3050-3056
Mandarin and English Single Word Processing Studied with
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Michael W. L.
Chee1,
Edsel W. L.
Tan1, and
Thorsten
Thiel2
1 Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Singapore General
Hospital, Singapore 169856, Singapore, and 2 MR-Tomography,
Department of Radiology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg 79104, Germany
The cortical organization of language in bilinguals remains
disputed. We studied 24 right-handed fluent bilinguals: 15 exposed to
both Mandarin and English before the age of 6 years; and nine exposed
to Mandarin in early childhood but English only after the age of 12 years. Blood oxygen level-dependent contrast functional magnetic
resonance imaging was performed while subjects performed cued word
generation in each language. Fixation was the control task. In both
languages, activations were present in the prefrontal, temporal, and
parietal regions, and the supplementary motor area. Activations in the
prefrontal region were compared by (1) locating peak activations and
(2) counting the number of voxels that exceeded a statistical
threshold. Although there were differences in the magnitude of
activation between the pair of languages, no subject showed significant
differences in peak-location or hemispheric asymmetry of activations in
the prefrontal language areas. Early and late bilinguals showed a
similar pattern of overlapping activations. There are no significant
differences in the cortical areas activated for both Mandarin and
English at the single word level, irrespective of age of acquisition of
either language.
Key words:
bilingualism; functional magnetic resonance imaging; brain mapping; English-Chinese comparison; visual word processing; language
Copyright © 1999 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/99/1983050-07$05.00/0
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