Sentence translation in proficient bilinguals: A direct electrostimulation brain mapping

Abstract

Direct cortical electrostimulation was used to study cortical areas hypothetically involved in translation in bilinguals during brain tumour resections, with a view to sparing these functional areas. A series of seven proficient bilingual patients was studied: two left-handed and five right-handed individuals with no pre-existing language deficit. Hemispheric cortex (on the side contralateral to the patient’s hand-dominance) was directly stimulated whilst the patient performed naming and reading tasks in both languages and a translation task (of a written text from their second ‘learned’ language to their first or ‘native’ language). Of the 147 different cortical sites studied, 26 ‘language functional sites’ were detected, where electrostimulation affected reading and/or naming in the patient’s native and/or second learned language. Of these, 8 sites (in 4 patients) were “task-specific” and “language-specific” i.e., affecting only naming or reading in only one of the patient’s languages. Of the 26 “language sites”, only 3 produced any interferences in translation. All of these were located in frontal regions. Electrostimulation at these sites caused the patient to stop translating abruptly, but no language switching or other translation-related phenomenon was observed. No site was found that was involved only in translation and not other language tasks.Overall, in contrast to other language tasks, cortical structures of the convexity were rarely involved in translation. We suggest that translation interference could be more readily detected by subcortical stimulations. This spatial dissociation within the brain of translation function versus other language functions could explain the cases of dissociated language impairments observed in some bilingual patients with brain lesions. On a practical level, because the cortical sites found by translation tasks are few and related with other cortical language sites, we think that translation tasks provide little additional helpful information for cortical brain mapping in bilingual neurosurgical patients.