Poster A41, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Right hemisphere dominates tonal bilingualism: multimodal imaging evidences
Zhao Gao1;1University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
The research technique on bilinguals have largely dependent on task-related functional connectivity. However, the inherent mechanism of bilinguals is still unclear and multimodal evidences are insufficient. With the development of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI), we can non-invasively investigate the intrinsic changes of functional connectivity patterns. In this study 30 Bai-Han Chinese simultaneous bilinguals and 28 Han Chinese monolinguals with gender and age matched were scanned in a resting state. The resting-state functional connectivity between bilinguals and monolinguals was compared to explore the changes of brain functional connectivity of bilingual network. The Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) was used additionally to examine the difference in gray matter density and the Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) was to discover structural variance in white matter. Resting-state functional connectivity analyses found significantly increased functional connectivity between right pars orbitalis and other three regions respectively - right caudate, right pars opercularis, and left inferior temporal gyrus in Bai-Han Chinese bilinguals. The volume of gray matter in right pars triangularis was also found greater in bilinguals than monolinguals. Consistent with previous literature, the mean fractional anisotropy of right superior longitudinal fasciculus (parietal bundle) was higher in bilinguals than that in monolinguals. Our findings suggested that the intrinsic language network in simultaneous bilinguals had been shaped distinctively from monolinguals in terms of function and structure. It provides a comprehensive reference for bilingual studies and their language mechanism in brain.
Themes: Multilingualism, Methods
Method: Functional Imaging