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Neurocognitive aspects of Bilingualism

In a multilingual world, understanding of cognitive and neural processes related to bilingualism is important. How independent or dependent language systems are in a bilingual mind/brain? Which aspects of processing are shared by the two languages? How do the structural similarities between languages affect their interrelations in bilinguals? Languages commonly used in Scandinavia such as Swedish, Norwegian, English and Finnish provide highly interesting comparison points along a continuum of structural similarity/difference between languages. In the present project, we are addressing these issues through a series of psycholinguistic experiments which will deal with (a) morphological processing in mono- vs. bilinguals and (b) translation performance in bilinguals. Part of the experiments will also be combined with functional MRI measurement, tapping the neural correlates of these processes.

Researchers

Matti Laine (PI, Åbo Akademi University, Finland)
Kenneth Hugdahl (Bergen University, Norway)
Jussi Niemi (Joensuu University, Finland)
Erling Wande (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Ph.D. students:
Minna Lehtonen (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)

Funding

NOS-S (Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Science Research Councils) for years 2002-2004.

Contact

Matti Laine (matti.laine@abo.fi)
Minna Lehtonen (minna.lehtonen@abo.fi)

References

Laine, M., Rinne, J.O., Krause, B.J., Teräs, M. & Sipilä, H. (1999) Left hemisphere activation during processing of morphologically complex word forms in adults. Neuroscience Letters, 271, 85-88.

Laine, M., Vainio, S. & Hyönä, J. (1999) Lexical access routes to nouns in a morphologically rich language. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 109-135.

Portin, M. & Laine, M. (2001) Processing cost associated with inflectional morphology in bilingual speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 55-62.

Rinne, J.O., Tommola, J., Laine, M., Krause, B.J., Schmidt, D., Kaasinen, V., Teräs, M., Sipilä, H. & Sunnari, M. (2000) The translating brain: cerebral activation patterns during simultaneous interpreting. Neuroscience Letters, 294, 85-88.