Analogical Reasoning in Bilingual Minds:An fMRI study of English Simile Comprehension in Mandarin-English Bilinguals

• Main Authors: Chang, Yu-Chen, 張瑜真
• Other Authors: 楊梵孛
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/88388473782523679416

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 102 === Previous research on similes has only reported involvement of the medial frontal gyrus, focused on monolingual processing, and assumed different conceptual relations all engage similar cognitive subprocesses. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study investigated simile comprehension for Mandarin-English bilinguals in order to characterize the general analogical reasoning network as well as hemisphere involvement of second language simile processing. Fifteen healthy Mandarin-English bilinguals (9 females, 6 males; mean age=25.1, SD=2.5) participated in the fMRI experiment. Stimuli consisted of 125 short English sentences created for five conditions: literal sentences (e.g., he is a donor), attributive similes (e.g., Milk is like silk), relational similes (e.g., Mosquitoes are like vampires), double similes (e.g., A spine is like a tree trunk), and anomalous sentences (e.g., a school is like a sandwich). Imaging results revealed that similes, relative to literal sentences, involve the medial frontal gyrus in analogical mapping. Regions outside frontal cortices responsible for recollection and retrieval of paralinguistic cues were also engaged in simile comprehension. Anomalies, on the other hand, do not reflect further cognitive efforts spent in retrieving known knowledge and social cues helpful to understand the sentence meaning. Data indicated that simile comprehension in bilinguals activated the medial frontal gyrus as monolinguals reported in previous studies. The degree to which subregions in the prefrontal cortex and other brain areas are involved in simile comprehension is differentially modulated by subtypes of simile. The results also revealed that simile comprehension engaged both hemispheres, and thus provided support of bilateral hemisphere processing for figurative language.