Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Department of Linguistics - Faculty of Humanities - Tarbiat Modares University
2 Department of Psychology - Humboldt university of berlin - Germany
3 Departments of Neuroscience - Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Bilingualism are associated with structural adaptations of subcortical regions taking part in controlling multiple languages (Korenar, Treffers-Daller and Pliatsikas, 2023). The thalamus is a paired gray matter structure located near the center of the brain, regulating the information transmission to cortical regions. In a recent fMRI study, the sensitivity of the thalamus to grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli has been shown at whole-brain level in the first language (L1) of bilinguals (Meykadeh et al., 2021). Here, we explore the activation patterns of bilateral thalamus in both L1 and L2 using a ROI-based approach. To do so, the percentage of signal change for grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli in L1 and L2 was extracted as the intensity measure per participant. Thirty-six Turkish-Persian bilinguals (21 women) who had acquired their L2 at the age of 7 were selected. Based on the Bilingual Dominance Scale, there was no significant difference between the proficiency level of participants in L1 (Turkish) and L2 (Persian). Participants carried out an auditory grammaticality judgment task in an alternating language switching paradigm while fMRI images were acquired. ROI-based results confirmed the grammaticality effect only in L1 and the left thalamus. Considering that L1 was the dominant language in our study and gave rise to larger reversed language dominance effects, we suggest that the engagement of the thalamus in L1 is not associated with syntactic processing but instead may exert an overall monitoring and control function for language-specific cortical activities.
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