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Cerebro-cerebellar interactions during narrative comprehension in Chinese-English bilinguals
Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Chan Tang1, Guosheng Ding#; 1Beijing Normal University
Bilinguals utilize shared but not perfectly same brain regions when processing different languages. While previous research indicated that both the cerebrum and cerebellum were engaged in bilingual language processing, less research investigate the cerebro-cerebellar interaction and whether the interaction profile were flexibly adjusted in bilingual brain. Here we focus on cerebro-cerebellar interaction during oral narrative comprehension, trying to reveal the interaction profile during the first and the second language processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. Further, we explore the neural encoding and decoding mechanisms for different stories with cerebro-cerebellar interaction patterns. Twenty-eight highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals were included in the experiment (all females, 22.9 ± 2.8 yrs). All subjects listened to eight 60 s-long stories in both Chinese version and English version. Before scanning, all the participants completed the General English Test, fluency test, English speaking and comprehension assessment as well as the Language History Questionnaire(LBQ). Imaging data were acquired on a Siemens 3-T Trio scanner. Univariate analysis and functional connectivity analysis were performed first after controlling for AoA and proficiency. Network analysis was then carried out to draw a whole picture of brain organization during bilingual narrative processing. In order to further illustrate the role of cerebro-cerebellar interactions during narrative comprehension, we complete a multivariate analysis in which individual cerebellar voxel to the whole cerebrum connectivity pattern were extracted and used to decode different story using Representational similarity analysis. Results show that both the cerebellum and the cerebrum were recruited in the narrative processing, with similar activation pattern across languages (peak cerebellum activation in Right Crus2, located in (11,-85,-42)). Whole-brain connectivity analysis reveals that the cerebro-cerebellar connections show a L1 preference in which stronger cross-brain coupling during L1 narrative processing compared to L2 narrative processing. Network analysis further confirms that L1 processing shows higher Characteristic path length (t(27) = 2.17, p = 0.039), which indicates a higher functional integration of brain network. In addition, RSA based on multivariate cerebro-cerebellar connectivity pattern shows that distributed cerebellar voxels’ connectivity pattern could decode different story meaning, which mostly located similarly at bilateral posterior cerebellum including region Ⅶ, Ⅷ, crusⅠ and Ⅱ in both languages. While wider range of cerebellar voxel’ could represent different narrative meaning using connectivity pattern during L1 processing(725 voxels in L1 and 389 voxels in L2, FDR p<0.05), voxels in right Ⅵ can represent story meaning only based on L2 connectivity pattern, which indicate a more extensive representation of story meaning in cerebellum during L1 narrative processing and a special role of right Ⅵ in story meaning decoding during L2 narrative processing. Our results provide important insights as to how the cerebellum is engaged in language processing and deepen our understanding of the cerebro-cerebellar interaction mechanism in bilingual narrative processing.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics