The contribution of Planum Temporale in Number-Person features processing in bilinguals: An fMRI study

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 PhD in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor, Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

3 Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience and Addiction Studies, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The Planum Temporale (PT) is a cortical area posterior to Heschl's gyrus and within the Sylvian fissure. Hemispheric PT asymmetry of functional activation during hearing- or language-related tasks is well-established. Due to the role of the PT in language processing, we examined its contribution to phi-feature agreement processing.
The theory of phi-features (Ackema and Neeleman, 2018, 2019) has proposed two core hypotheses for Number and Person agreements. First, R-expressions do not have Person, while pronouns do. Second, all Persons have a Person feature. By contrast, singular is the absence of a Number feature. This account is based, among others, on the evidence reported by Zawiszewski, Santesteban and Laka (2016) and Mancini et al. (2017), which proposes two generalizations for fMRI activation when the verb carries incorrect agreement. In sentences with R-expressions as subject, Person behaves qualitatively differently from Number and will have a quantitatively larger effect. In sentences with pronouns as subject, there are no qualitative differences between Person and Number, but Person will have a quantitatively larger effect. Recently, Meykadeh et al. (in press) addressed the case where R-expressions and Pronouns were used as subject, respectively, for Number and Person Violations and showed that Number Violations evoked more effects than Person Violations in posterior Superior Temporal Gyrus. The authors suggested that R-expression and pronoun processing are qualitatively different. It is currently unknown whether this pattern is also true for the PT area. Hence, in the present analysis we investigated the contribution of PT to phi-features processing of L1 and L2 sentences.
The current study addresses the following questions:

To what extent is left and right PT involved in phi-features processing by balanced bilinguals?
How does the PT area contribute to L1-L2 Number-Person phi-features processing?
Is the PT area equipped with feature-mapping mechanism to identify Number and Person features?

To answer these questions, we adapted a bilingual task with an alternating language switching paradigm, in a population of balanced bilinguals and applied fMRI recordings.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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