Neural activation in speech production and reading aloud in native and non-native languages

The timing of language learning shapes brain structure associated with articulation

“…The structural patterns observed in this VBM study, together with results from a previous fMRI investigation of speech production in these same subjects (Berken et al 2015), shed light on the relationship between brain structure and function, a topic of considerable recent interest. Our findings suggest that while early, simultaneous language acquisition leads to increased GMD in specific brain areas, resulting in less intense hemodynamic activation, late L2 acquisition requires the structural enhancement of alternative and additional neural regions, as well as increased functional recruitment of these areas to achieve native-like speech.…”

“…Sequential bilinguals were either English (L1)-French (L2) or French (L1)-English (L2). We included these two combinations of language users in our sequential bilingual population, as we previously demonstrated that these orthographically similar languages are represented similarly in the brain for these participants (Berken et al 2015). All bilingual subjects were exposed to and used French and English on a daily basis.…”

“…Subjects were instructed to create the most relevant story that came to mind. Spectrograms were generated for each sample using Praat software (Boersma 2001), and speech was then evaluated using the Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb 2009), an automated pipeline, for (a) lexicosemantics-number of unique and total words, (b) complexity of syntax, and (c) speech fluency-words per minute (Berken et al 2015). Scoring by this algorithm was then checked for accuracy by manual inspection.…”

“…In contrast, sequential bilinguals demonstrated denser gray matter in the bilateral premotor cortex, an area associated with heightened functional activation during L2 speech production (Berken et al 2015). The premotor cortex is known to be involved in motor learning (Dayan and Cohen 2011), and increased cortical thickness and GMD in the right hemisphere have been associated with musicianship (Bermudez et al 2008) and musical skill acquisition in children after 15 months of training (Hyde et al 2009).…”

Using precise word timing information improves decoding accuracy in a multiband-accelerated multimodal reading experiment

“…As such, many fMRI studies on sentence comprehension utilize a relatively long repetition time (TR, ~2000 ms) and limit experiments to single word presentation per trial (Correia et al, 2014; Flegal, Marin-Gutierrez, Ragland, & Ranganath, 2014; Meltzer-Asscher, Mack, Barbieri, & Thompson, 2015). The majority of studies that do present full sentences typically only model sentence onsets, assuming all words within a sentence are read simultaneously and/or processed throughout the trial (Berken et al, 2015; He et al, 2015; Moisala et al, 2015; Vitello, Warren, Devlin, & Rodd, 2014). While such a model is expedient, it does not fully capture, for example, syntactic differences between sentences, which involve subtle word order variations (Dapretto & Bookheimer, 1999; Wu, Vissiennon, Friederici, & Brauer, 2016).…”