Right now we're only looking for males, under 30 years old, right-handed, who speak English as a first language, have no metal anywhere in their bodies (dental work except braces is okay), and who have no history of seizures or head trauma.
If you qualify, you should email me at janelemon at gmail dot com.
Wow. The original post is, like, months and months old. I'm surprised you unearthed it.
Yes, first and second languages are stored differently in the brain. The fMRI experiments that we were conducting involved looking at the connection between Broca's and Wernike's areas, as well as the frontal cortex. Subjects would think of English words and we would look at the areas of activation. People who are truly bilingual or spoke English as a second language, no matter how fluent, would have different activation patters than people who were native English speakers.
I guess I must have googled en-ki's blog for "brain scan" or something, since gaspaheangea told me about it.
Can you find differences between people producing their native languages, by language, i.e. a Portuguese speaker speaking Portuguese vs. a native English speaker speaking English?
So truly bilingual people should be excluded from the study, huh? If this is the case, then I guess one shouldn't simply advertise for native-English speakers... Anyway, I wish I could measure my fluency in different languages through fMRI. Is this possible?
I don't know the answer to any of these. We did research on people with autism and how they process language. To elminate any possible confounds, we only used non-bilingual, native speakers of American English, who were also right-handed males under 25.
Also, I wasn't exactly advertising on en_ki's journal (our real, approved recruitment material had the specifics).
I've read about preliminary studies that show that humans do process spoken language the about same way, no matter what the language, but not a lot of work has been done in this area (which is why we decided to avoid any issues by making sure everyone in our study spoke the same language).
There's a lot more to language besides words (which is one of the reasons why autistic people tend to have communication deficits). There may be activation differences between people of cultures where, for example, it's disrespectful to look someone in the eye and people from cultures where this is accepted (lots of information is gathered by looking at someone's face). I'm also not sure if sign language is processed at all in the same way.
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