Understanding fairy tales spoken in dialect: an fMRI study

ABSTRACT

Dialect comprehension has rarely been studied on the text level. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the neuronal processing of auditory story comprehension was compared in 17 bilectal listeners who spoke Standard German and High Alemannic dialect, and in 19 monolectal listeners who did not speak dialect but only Standard German. 24 fairy tales were translated and recorded by speakers of both varieties. A text-related Extended Language Network (ELN) was more active for intelligible conditions compared to an unintelligible baseline. When High Alemannic fairy tales were presented, bilectal listeners activated the left aTL significantly more than monolectals. This activation was stronger for listeners who rated the dialect more pleasant. It increased over the duration of the stories, but more so for the familiar varieties. These results confirm the importance of the left aTL for text comprehension and add to our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of dialect comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Text comprehension
• neuroimaging
• dialect
• anterior temporal lobe
• bilectal

Acknowledgements

The fMRI study was conducted at the Freiburg Brain Imaging Centre (FBI) at the University Hospital of Freiburg. We thank Prof. Dr. C. Weiller and Prof. Dr. I. Mader for allocating scanning sessions and H.-J. Mast for operating the scanner. Dr. Simon Maier advised on data analysis and Lukas Diestel and Ram Venkateswaran assisted with pretesting and conducting the experiment.

This work was conducted in partial fulfilment of the first author’s (J.S.) requirements for a PhD dissertation at the University of Freiburg. She was supported by fellowships of the Adolf Haeuser foundation of the University of Freiburg and of the Baden-Württemberg State Graduate Scholarship Programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.