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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Cortical timescale representations are longer in second than in first language

Mathis Lamarre¹, Catherine Chen², Fatma Deniz¹; ¹Technische Universität Berlin, ²Princeton University

Presenter: Mathis Lamarre

Behavioral evidence suggests that humans process language more slowly and with greater effort in their second (L2) than in their first language (L1). However, the brain mechanisms underlying this difference remain unclear. To address this question, we compared functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings of L1 Chinese - L2 English bilinguals who read the same set of narratives in both languages. We extracted embeddings from a multilingual contextual language model and computed features that describe the narratives at different timescales. We used voxelwise encoding models to measure the timescale selectivity of each voxel, in each language separately. To disentangle effects of L1 and L2 processing from differences between English and Chinese, we also compared timescales representations between L1 English and L2 English speakers. Our results suggest that cortical representations of language timescales are longer in L2 as compared to L1.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing