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Bilingual adult neural processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
Noelani Kong-Johnson1, V. Andrew Stenger2, Jonas Vibell1, Kamil Deen1; 1University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2John A. Burns School of Medicine, Honolulu, HI
Language is full of ambiguity, from word-level (e.g., ‘play’ can be a verb or a noun) to sentence-level (e.g., “the man saw the woman with binoculars” can have two meanings, depending on who has the binoculars). When we hear an ambiguous sentence and unintentionally get the wrong meaning, it requires that we revise our interpretation. That revision is cognitively demanding and requires a great deal of cognitive resources. All speakers must deal with this ambiguity, but on top of this, bilinguals must also deal with potential cross-language interference due to parallel activation of both languages. This has led to the proposal that bilingual brains are adapted to handle conflict more efficiently than monolingual brains. We test this proposal by having Hawaiian-English bilingual children (ages 5-10) and adults perform two syntactic ambiguity resolution tasks while in an MRI. In the action verification task, participants listen to a garden-path sentence, watch a character act out the sentence on the screen, then indicate if the action matches the sentence. In the picture selection task, participants select one of two illustrations that best matches a sentence containing a global prepositional phrase ambiguity. We also collect structural and diffusion weighted images to address the following broad goals: 1) are the brain networks that bilingual children and adults recruit different, and possibly less widespread, than monolinguals, and 2) do bilinguals show differences in white matter connectivity and gray matter volume in the conflict resolution network. This same project was presented at last year’s meeting as part of the Sandbox Series and we now have adult data to present some results. In adults, we expected to find that conflict resolution areas, like LIFG and pre-SMA, are more active in the ambiguous compared to the unambiguous and filler conditions in both tasks, and this is what we find. Further, in the action verification task, we find that control regions are activated more following the disambiguating word compared to before, suggesting that adults use revision to reach their final interpretation of the sentence. In the picture selection task, we find a slightly different network of control regions activated in the ambiguous condition, suggesting that the global prepositional phrase ambiguity targets a different conflict resolution mechanism than garden-path sentence revision. We also find that the bilingual adults, while demonstrating no difference in behavioral responses, engage the conflict resolution network in a different way than the monolingual adults. Our finding that adult Hawaiian-English bilinguals engage control mechanisms in the brain to a different degree than monolinguals is consistent with a body of literature that demonstrates the same thing using speakers Italian, Dutch, English, and German. It also addresses our goal of broadening the scope of Hawaiian language research beyond pedagogical and grassroots movements to encourage families and educators to commit to speaking Hawaiian with their children to promote a bilingual Hawai’i.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes