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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on May 28, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp101
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Impact of Second Language Learning on Semantic and Nonsemantic First Language Reading

Chiara Nosarti1, Andrea Mechelli2, David W. Green3 and Cathy J. Price4

1 Department of Psychiatry, Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK, 2 Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, UK, 3 Research Department of Cognitive, Perceptual, and Brain Sciences, 4 Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, UK

Address correspondence to Prof. Cathy J. Price, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, 12, Queen Square, London WC1 3BG, UK

The relationship between orthography (spelling) and phonology (speech sounds) varies across alphabetic languages. Consequently, learning to read a second alphabetic language, that uses the same letters as the first, increases the phonological associations that can be linked to the same orthographic units. In subjects with English as their first language, previous functional imaging studies have reported increased left ventral prefrontal activation for reading words with spellings that are inconsistent with their orthographic neighbors (e.g., PINT) compared with words that are consistent with their orthographic neighbors (e.g., SHIP). Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 17 Italian–English and 13 English–Italian bilinguals, we demonstrate that left ventral prefrontal activation for first language reading increases with second language vocabulary knowledge. This suggests that learning a second alphabetic language changes the way that words are read in the first alphabetic language. Specifically, first language reading is more reliant on both lexical/semantic and nonlexical processing when new orthographic to phonological mappings are introduced by second language learning. Our observations were in a context that required participants to switch between languages. They motivate future fMRI studies to test whether first language reading is also altered in contexts when the second language is not in use.


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