Spatiotemporal organization of bioelectrical brain activity during reading of syntagmatic and paradigmatic collocations by students with different foreign language proficiency

Abstract

Texts or words/pseudowords are often used as stimuli for human verbal activity research. We have studied the processes of decoding grammatical constructions consisted of two-three words, i.e., collocations. Irrelevant Russian and English collocation sets were presented to 30 Russian-speaking students (20.4 ± 0.22 years old on average) with different English language skills. The following two types of collocations were used: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The subjects were divided into 2 equal groups depending on their English language skill (linguists/nonlinguists). Bioelectrical brain activity of the cortex during reading was recorded from 12 electrodes in the α-, β-, and θ-bands. The coherence function reflecting the cooperation of different cortical areas when reading the collocations was analyzed. The observed intensification of interhemispheric and diagonal connections while reading the collocations in different languages demonstrates the significance of functional interaction between the hemispheres when processing verbal stimuli in different languages. It was shown that bioelectrical brain activity in the students with good foreign language proficiency during the reading of all types of collocations in Russian and in English is characterized by an economic system of functional interaction between the cortical areas compared to nonlinguists. The selective activation of certain cortical areas (depending on the type of grammatical construction) was also observed in the group of nonlinguists, which is probably associated with a special decoding system for processing the presented stimuli. The reading of Russian paradigmatic constructions and English syntagmatic collocations by nonlinguists caused intensification of the intrahemispheric interaction between the left and right cortical areas, respectively.