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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Cortical representations are similar across English and Chinese for both concrete and abstract concepts

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

Presenter: Mathis Lamarre

Concreteness, the degree to which a concept refers to a perceptible entity, plays a key role in psycholinguistic models of bilingualism. They suggest that concrete concepts are more similarly represented across languages than abstract concepts. Yet, most of these studies used only behavioral data and controlled stimuli. Thus, it is unclear how similarity of representations across languages relates to concreteness in the brain of bilingual speakers. To address this question, we analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings of Chinese-English bilinguals reading narratives translated in both languages using voxelwise encoding models. We used semantic features aligned between English and Chinese. We measured whether each voxel represents more concrete or abstract concepts in each language, and how similar these concepts are across languages. Our results show that similarity of representations across English and Chinese is high for both concrete and abstract concepts.

Topic Area: Language & Communication

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