Tohoku University Cognitive Neuroscience Application Center

When bilinguals produce sentences in their first language (L1) and second language (L2), how is syntactic information integrated? Is this integrative processing based merely on surface-level word order similarity, or does it rely on deeper abstract syntactic representations? At the 26th Annual International Conference of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences (JSLS2025), Huang Qiang, student of Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, gave an oral presentation titled “Neural Correlates of Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming in Sentence Production: Evidence from Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals.” In this presentation, we demonstrated for the first time that Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, when producing sentences in both L1 and L2, recruit the same region in the left anterior middle temporal gyrus and share a common neural mechanism for syntactic processing. This syntactic integration was found not to be the result of surface-level structural similarity alone, but rather to be based on deep, abstract syntactic representations. (Jeong)

Qiang Huang, Yuto Aki, Daiko Takahashi, Motoaki Sugiura, & Hyeonjeong Jeong
Neural Correlates of Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Priming in Sentence Production: Evidence from Chinese-Japanese Bilinguals
The Japanese Society for Language Sciences (JSLS), Matsuyama, Ehime University, Japan【 Oral 】
https://jslsweb.sakura.ne.jp/wp/?page_id=1678&lang=en