Brain scan from ORC research. Gray brain scan on black background with red markings on small brain areas towards the center.

Different Word Orders, Same Brain Areas

Linguistics PhD student Donald Dunagan has been comparing brain activity in speakers of English and Chinese.

Along with fellow Ph.D. student Shulin Zhang and advisor Dr. John Hale, he finds that speakers of those two languages use roughly the same brain areas to understand relative clauses. This similarity is notable given the differences in word order between the two languages.

Figure 1. Example phase structure trees with annotations for the corresponding word-by-word object-extracted relative clause (ORC) and bottom-up syntactic processing metric values. Tree A includes the example English sentence with an ORC given in example 3 of the text. Tree B includes the example Chinese sentence with an ORC given in example 4.

This result points to a deep commonality between languages at the level of word-by-word sentence comprehension. The article appeared in Neurobiology of Language.

Figure 4. ORC voxel-level intersection of the FDR-thresholded Chinese and English maps, with no cluster thresholding.

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from all over the world. Co-authors include Miloš Stanojević (Google Deepmind), Maximin Coavoux (University of Grenoble-Alpes), Shohini Bhattasali (University of Toronto, Scarborough), Jixing Li (City University of Hong Kong), and Jonathan Brennan (University of Michigan).

Personnel


Donald Dunagan

Ph.D. Candidate
dgd45125@uga.edu


Shulin Zhang

Ph.D. Candidate
sz38235@uga.edu


John Hale

Arch Professor in World Languages and Cultures
jthale@uga.edu

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