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Neural Evidence for Shared Conceptual Representations in Bilinguals
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Maya Taliaferro1, Esti Blanco-Elorrieta1; 1New York University
The world is filled with a vast array of entities, from tangible objects like chairs and trees to intangible concepts like emotions and ideas. Humans use labels to classify these entities into categories based on shared features (Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Importantly, different languages emphasize distinct features when defining category boundaries (Malt, et al., 2003). As a result, concept boundaries can vary significantly across languages, such that even direct translations can map onto distinct underlying conceptual representations. This raises the question of how bilinguals’ conceptual system is structured such that it can accommodate cases where conceptual representations do not fully align across languages. Theoretically, bilinguals may either maintain separate, language-specific conceptual representations or integrate features from both languages to create conceptual blends (Blanco-Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021; Taliaferro et al., 2025). Here, we addressed this question by recording MEG activity as 24 monolingual English, 24 monolingual Mandarin, and 25 bilingual Mandarin-English speakers performed a two alternative forced choice task (2AFC). Participants selected the best label for images of household objects that formed seven step continua between two unambiguous image/categories (e.g., a plate and a bowl). Bilingual participants completed the task in both English and Mandarin on separate days, with the order of languages counterbalanced across participants. This design enabled us to localize each language group’s conceptual boundary, defined as the point along the continuum where categorization shifted from one concept to the other. We found that bilinguals maintained a single conceptual boundary for both languages even when monolingual speakers of each language had a different one. This unified bilingual boundary shifted toward the language acquired earlier in life in unbalanced bilinguals and laid perfectly between the boundaries of each language when both languages were acquired simultaneously. Additionally, we ran a spatio-temporal RSA analysis on MEG data where we tested whether neural activity in bilinguals aligned better with model matrices built based upon either i) conceptual representations defined by our monolingual English speakers ii) conceptual representations defined by our monolingual Mandarin speakers or iii) conceptual representations defined by our Mandarin-English bilingual speakers. Additionally, we tested for language-agnostic visual similarity-based representations in the visual cortex, with model matrices built from a visual neural net (ResNet) and human object similarity judgments. We found clusters of brain activity reflecting visual features and similarity ratings in the visual cortex across all groups starting approximately 180ms. In contrast, clusters aligning with conceptual representations localized to the left temporal lobe within approximately 250–400ms after stimulus onset. Crucially, bilinguals’ neural patterns aligned more closely with the shared conceptual model than with either monolingual model. These results provide novel neural evidence that bilinguals do not maintain separate conceptual systems for each language but rather, rely on a shared conceptual system shaped by the age at which each language was acquired, and this conceptual representations are localized to the anterior temporal lobe.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,