Phonological processing in Chinese-English bilingual biscriptals: an FMRI study

The advent of modern neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provided an impetus for investigating language representation in the healthy bilingual brain. To date, neuroimaging experiments involving English-Chinese bilinguals suggest that common brain areas subserve the two languages. Given that the oral and written forms of English and Mandarin differ so markedly, and differences have been reported for bi-alphabetic readers, the null findings for English-Chinese bilinguals warrant further investigation. In this paper, the language representation of skilled English-Chinese bilingual biscriptals was investigated at the phonological level, using both equivalent behavioural (N = 28) and fMRI (n = 6) experiments. Differences in neural activation patterns between English and Mandarin will be discussed.