Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1896-4599

Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Department or Program

Psychological & Brain Sciences

First Advisor

Dr. David J. M. Kraemer

Abstract

How do novice language learners represent semantic information in their new language? The extent to which languages are supported by distinct or overlapping neural representations in bilinguals has been the topic of much research, but less is known about how new knowledge is integrated into established representational networks, especially at the earliest stages of language acquisition. Furthermore, most investigations have compared languages which share a modality (spoken). Signed languages can provide insight into language unconfounded by perceptual qualities that spoken languages share. Chapter 1 presents an initial study in which hearing English-speaking non-signers learned a set of nouns in American Sign Language (ASL) before fMRI scanning. Neural patterns which correlate with semantic features in ASL and English (but not an unstudied control language) provide a proof of concept that overlapping cross-language representations emerge after just a few hours of learning. In Chapter 2, I replicate these results in a larger dataset and additionally show that two different data-driven measures of neural correspondence between ASL and English reflect individual differences in comprehension in several frontal, temporal, and occipital regions. Lastly, Chapter 3 presents a longitudinal study which measured ASL learning over several weeks with more complex and dynamic stimuli. Leveraging prior work in which relies on large language models (LLMs) to capture complex semantic features from stimuli, I present initial analyses which suggest that a model trained on neural data during audio-only English listening can estimate neural responses to not only audiovisual English stimuli, but visual clips of sentences in ASL in superior temporal regions. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate the role of frontal and temporal regions, especially bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in representing semantic content across language and modality in novice learners.

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