Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English

Xiaohan Zhang, Shaonan Wang, Nan Lin, Chengqing Zong

Abstract
Evidence from psycholinguistic studies suggests that the human brain builds a hierarchical syntactic structure during language comprehension. However, it is still unknown whether the neural basis of such structures is universal across languages. In this paper, we first analyze the differences in language structure between two diverse languages: Chinese and English. By computing the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to different language structures, we find that top-down parsing generates less memory load for the right-branching English and bottom-up parsing is less memory-demanding for Chinese.Then we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the brain has different syntactic adaptation strategies in processing Chinese and English. Specifically, for both Chinese and English, we extract predictors from the implementations of different parsing strategies, i.e., bottom-up and top-down. Then, these predictors are separately associated with fMRI signals. Results show that for Chinese and English, the brain utilizes bottom-up and top-down parsing strategies separately. These results reveal that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory processing load according to different language structures.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.535
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7852–7861
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.535
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.535
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaohan Zhang, Shaonan Wang, Nan Lin, and Chengqing Zong. 2022. Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7852–7861, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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