Schedule of Events | Symposia

Engagement of language-specific and domain-general neural mechanisms in native and second language comprehension

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Agata Wolna^1,2, Aaron Wright¹, Evelina Fedorenko¹, Zofia Wodniecka²; ¹MIT, Cambridge, USA, ²Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Unbalanced bilinguals exhibit greater engagement of domain-general resources when speaking in their second language (L2), a pattern which has been attributed to domain-general control mechanisms managing concurrent activation of both languages. However, it remains unclear whether the neural differences between L1 and L2 processing extend to language comprehension and whether they vary depending on the utterance complexity. We addressed this question in an fMRI study in which 30 Polish-English bilinguals silently read words, sentences, and stories in L1 and L2. Additionally, using functional localizer tasks, we identified individual participants’ language and domain-general multiple-demand (MD) networks. Neural responses during the reading tasks were analyzed to assess the effects of language (L1 vs. L2) and utterance complexity (words vs. sentences vs. stories) within these networks. Results revealed that the language network exhibited stronger activation for sentences and stories compared to single words while the MD network showed no such differences. We also found that reading in L2 also elicited consistently higher activation than L1 in the language network and the MD network. Interestingly, this difference was modulated by the stimulus type, with no difference between L1 and L2 in single word processing but significant differences between languages in reading sentences and stories. These findings provide new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying bilingual language processing. First, we show that comprehension in L2 is linked to stronger responses in both the language and the MD systems. Our results also suggest that these differences are more pronounced in more complex materials than single words.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other