Linguistics PhD student Donald Dunagan has been comparing brain activity in speakers of English and Chinese.
Along with fellow Ph.D. student Shulin Zhang and advisor Dr. John Hale, he finds that speakers of those two languages use roughly the same brain areas to understand relative clauses. This similarity is notable given the differences in word order between the two languages.
This result points to a deep commonality between languages at the level of word-by-word sentence comprehension. The article appeared in Neurobiology of Language.
The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from all over the world. Co-authors include Miloš Stanojević (Google Deepmind), Maximin Coavoux (University of Grenoble-Alpes), Shohini Bhattasali (University of Toronto, Scarborough), Jixing Li (City University of Hong Kong), and Jonathan Brennan (University of Michigan).
