YOKOKAWA Hirokazu | ![]() |
Institute for Promotion of Higher Education / School of Languages and Communication | |
Professor | |
Literature |
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This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated the brain regions underlying language task performance in adult second language (L2) learners. Specifically, we identified brain regions where the level of activation was associated with L2 fluency levels. Thirty Japanese-speaking adults participated in the study. All participants were L2 learners of English and had achieved varying levels of fluency, as determined by a standardized L2 English proficiency test, the Versant English Test (Pearson Education Inc., 2011). When participants performed the oral sentence building task from the production tasks administered, the dorsal part of the left inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) showed activation patterns that differed depending on the L2 fluency levels: The more fluent the participants were, the more dIFG activation decreased. This decreased activation of the dIFG might reflect the increased automaticity of a syntactic building process. In contrast, when participants performed an oral story comprehension task, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) showed increased activation with higher fluency levels. This suggests that the learners with higher L2 fluency were actively engaged in post-syntactic integration processing supported by the left pSTG. These data imply that L2 fluency predicts neural resource allocation during language comprehension tasks as well as in production tasks. This study sheds light on the neural underpinnings of L2 learning by identifying the brain regions recruited during different language tasks across different modalities (production vs. comprehension). (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of IBRO. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, Aug. 2015, NEUROSCIENCE, 300 (6), 474 - 492, English[Refereed]
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Psychological research suggests that foreign-language vocabulary acquisition recruits the phonological loop for verbal working memory. To depict the neural underpinnings and shed light on the process of foreign language learning, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of Japanese participants without previous exposure to the Uzbek language using learning of novel Uzbek words. During encoding, spoken Uzbek words and corresponding visual objects were shown, and subjects either overtly repeated the words (phonological rehearsal) or overtly rehearsed numbers (phonological suppression). Phonological rehearsal improved the encoding performance. A learning-related decrease in rehearsal-specific activation was found in the left fusiform gyrus, right inferior temporal gyrus, and right cerebellum. Recollection of the phonologically rehearsed words activated the right cerebellum and left fusiform gyrus more prominently than recollection of the phonologically suppressed words in a performance-dependent manner. The phonological loop might provide the temporal and fragile registration of the articulatory pattern that is converted into a more durable form in the right cerebellum, which is in turn integrated with the object information in the fusiform gyrus.
WILEY-BLACKWELL, Dec. 2013, MIND BRAIN AND EDUCATION, 7 (4), 213 - 224, English[Refereed]
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American Association for Applied Linguistics
関西心理言語学研究会
ことばの科学会
小学校英語教育学会
コンピュータ利用教育学会(CIEC)
日本高次脳機能障害学会
大学英語教育学会 (JACET)
外国語教育メディア学会 (LET)
関西英語教育学会 (KELES)
全国英語教育学会 (JASELE)
Competitive research funding
Competitive research funding
Competitive research funding
Competitive research funding