Kei Yoshimoto

Cortical Mechanisms Involved in the Processing of Verbs: An fMRI Study

In this study, we investigated two aspects of verb processing: first, whether verbs are processed differently from nouns; and second, how verbal morphology is processed. For this purpose, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare three types of lexical processing in Japanese: the processing of nouns, unmarked active verbs, and inflected passive verbs. Twenty-eight healthy subjects were shown a lexical item and asked to judge whether the presented item was a legal word. Although all three conditions activated the bilateral inferior frontal, occipital, the left middle, and inferior temporal cortices, we found differences in the degree of activation for each condition. Verbs elicited greater activation in the left middle temporal gyrus than nouns, and inflected verbs showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus than unmarked verbs. This study demonstrates that although verbs are basically processed in the same cortical network as nouns, nouns and verbs elicit different degrees of activation due to the cognitive demands involved in lexical semantic processing. Furthermore, this study also shows that the left inferior frontal cortex is related to the processing of verbal inflectional morphology.

Cortical activation in the processing of passive sentences in L1 and L2: An fMRI study

The question of whether the bilingual brain processes a first and second language (L1 and L2, respectively) differently is a central issue in many psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether late bilinguals process structurally complex sentences in L1 and L2 in different cortical networks. For this purpose, we directly compared brain activity during the processing of active and passive sentences in both L1 and L2. We asked 36 healthy subjects to judge whether or not a presented sentence was semantically plausible. Both L1 and L2 activated the left hemispheric language-related regions such as the left inferior frontal, superior/middle temporal, and parietal cortices. However, we found different activation patterns between L1 and L2 in the processing of passive sentences. Passive sentences elicited greater activation than their active counterparts in the left pars triangularis, the premotor area, and the superior parietal lobule in Japanese, but not in English. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between sentence type (active versus passive) and language (Japanese versus English) in the left pars orbitalis. The results of this study indicate that late bilinguals use similar cortical regions to comprehend both L1 and L2. However, when late bilinguals are presented with structurally complex sentences, the involvement of these regions differs between L1 and L2. These results suggest that, in addition to age of L2 acquisition and L2 proficiency, differences in grammatical construction affect cortical representation during the comprehension of L1 and L2.

Cross-linguistic influence of first language writing systems on brain responses to second language word reading in late bilinguals

How human brains acquire second languages (L2) is one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience and language science. However, it is unclear whether the first language (L1) has a cross‐linguistic influence on the processing of L2.

Left middle temporal deactivation caused by insufficient second language word comprehension by Chinese–Japanese bilinguals

Neuroimaging studies of second language (L2) comprehension have reported that the low L2 proficiency of non-proficient learners is associated with greater brain activation in several regions due to the increased deployment of resources to process a not-so-familiar language. However, until now, no attention has been paid to the possibility that the non-proficiency of such learners can actually lead to insufficient use of brain regions where the first language (L1) speakers show increased brain activation. Here, our fMRI study found that the left middle temporal gyrus was less active during the L2 lexical decision of non-proficient Chinese learners of Japanese as L2 than during the L1 lexical decision of native Japanese speakers. Our results indicate that the difficulty experienced by non-proficient L2 learners in L2 lexical decision is due to their less active use of the left middle temporal gyrus, which is, contrastively, used actively by L1 speakers in their L1 lexical decision. These results in turn suggest that left middle temporal activation reflects whether or not the lexical information of L2 words is formed appropriately as part of the L2 mental lexicon.

Processing of information structure and floating quantifiers in japanese

Floating quantifiers (FQs) in Japanese have mainly been discussed from the perspective of syntax, which leaves some essential context-dependent aspects of the phenomena unexplained. In this paper, we approach the issue by formalizing the incremental processing of information structure in Japanese sentences by Minimal Recursion Semantics and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar . The long-standing problem of asymmetry between the subject and object in terms of the quantification by a non-adjacent FQ is resolved by a self-contradictory context specification which is obtained by expanding the MRS formalism using the information packaging theory.

Neuro-physiological evidence of linguistic empathy processing in the human brain: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Abstract Successful sentence comprehension requires not only syntactic and lexico-semantic processing, but also the processing of peripheral linguistic phenomena. However, less research attention has been focused on the latter. In order to examine whether the processing of linguistic empathy is psycho- and neuro-physiological in the human brain, we compared behavioral and brain activity data during the processing of an Ageru sentence with those of processing a Kureru sentence in Japanese, which are different from each other in terms of the processing of linguistic empathy. While we found no statistical difference in behavioral data between the two conditions but a statistically much greater activation in the left premotor area for the processing of the Kureru sentence than for the processing of the Ageru sentence. However, taken together with previous findings, our functional magnetic resonance imaging results suggest that the left premotor activation reflects not the processing of linguistic empathy per se, but rather the attentional shifting process of linguistic empathy in Kureru sentence comprehension.

A longitudinal fMRI study of neural plasticity in the second language lexical processing

P2-h26 Neural mechanisms of the lexically ambiguity resolution—An MEG study Aya Ihara1, Tomoe Hayakawa1,2, Qiang Wei1,3, Shinji Munetsuna1,3, Norio Fujimaki1,3 1 Biological ICT Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Kobe, Japan; 2 Department of Psychology, Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan; 3 Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japan

Floating Quantifiers in Japanese as Adverbial Anaphora

A surface-based analysis of so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) in Japanese is proposed based on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Minimal Recursion Semantics. We hypothesize that sentences with FQs, as other sentences, are processed incrementally from left to right and that an FQ has an independent semantic representation as NP that is anaphorically related to its antecedent. On these assumptions, we account for the asymmetry between the subject and object in terms of the quantification by a non-adjacent FQ. We also address a kind of FQ construction that has hitherto escaped the researchers’ attention, that with a whole-part relationship between the FQ and its host, and show that it is explained by the framework we bring forward.

Treebank annotation for formal semantics research

This paper motivates and describes treebank annotation for Japanese and English following a scheme adapted from the Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the PCEEC (Santorini 2010). The purpose of this annotation is to create a syntactic base from which meaning representations can be built automatically on a corpus linguistics scale (thousands of examples). Advantages of the adopted annotation scheme are highlighted. Most notably, marking clause level functional information is essential for deterministically building meaning representations beyond the predicate-argument structure level. Also an internal syntax where phrasal categories are fundamentally similar is of great assistance. Finally, the paper demonstrates how scope information is simple to add when bracketed syntactic structure is inherently flat.

Towards a Self-selective and Self-healing Evaluation

Assume a recursive routine for evaluating expressions against an assignment function that stores accumulated binding information for variable names. This paper proposes adding an If operation that allows for what is evaluated to be automatically selected during the runtime of evaluation based on the state of the assignment function. This can (a) allow a single encoding of content that would otherwise require distinct expressions, and (b) equip an expression with a way to recover from situations that would cause unwelcome results from evaluation. The new operation is demonstrated to be an essential component for allowing a robust interpretation of unknown lexical items and for feeding an automated regulation of binding dependencies determined on a grammatical basis.