Dr.Benjamin Zinszer from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department of the Universityof Rochester gave a talk entitled “You say potato, I say tŭdòu: How speakers of differentlanguages share the same concept” at Bilingual Cognition and Education Lab onAugust 2, 2015.  

Peoplearound the world speak different languages, but these languages all serve thesame purpose: Language encodes concepts represented in one person’s brain and,through this code, activates a similar representation in another person’s brain—thatis, communication. Dr. Zinszer not only is interested with cross-languagesemantic differences, but also wants to know how speakers of differentlanguages represent the same world. In this talk, he introduced his recent workon semantic processing of Chinese and English. Via multi-voxel pattern analysis(MVPA) of fMRI data, he showed speakers share a common conceptual ground, evenwhen they are using different languages. He found when naming objects in firstlanguage, Chinese and English speakers have highly similar conceptualrepresentations at inferior temporal gyrus (r=0.89), which suggests different languagesshare the same conceptual representations. This two-hour talk and the followingdiscussions shed lights on future research work on second language learning andbilingualism.  

Dr. BenjaminZinszer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Raizada Lab in the University ofRochester’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. He completed his PhD inPsychology at Penn State University, studying cross-language interaction inChinese-English bilinguals. His primary research interests are in semanticrepresentation, bilingualism and second language learning, using behavioral,functional MRI, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy methods. He publishedpapers in high-impact neuroscience journals, such as NeuroImage.