[Brain mappings in non-fluent late Chinese-English bilinguals].
OBJECTIVE
To discuss the distribution characteristics of language areas in Chinese-English non-fluent late bilinguals.


METHODS
Six Chinese-English bilinguals with eloquent tumors underwent awake-surgeries. The activated areas of BOLD-fMRI were obtained as the patients performed pure naming, verb generation, and abstract/concrete judgment tasks. Direct cortical stimulation(DCS) as the golden standard of language mapping were performed during awake-surgeries on the exposed cortical areas. BOLD-fMRI results of 3 language tasks were compared with DCS results. The statistical method was McNemer.


RESULTS
Sixteen positive sites(22.5%) were comfirmed out of 71 stimulations. There were 3 specific language sites, in which 2 sites were specific English sites and 1 site was specific Chinese site. When activated areas of BOLD-fMRI were compared with the DCS results, verb generation task had the highest concordance rate 40.9% (95%CI:30.2%-52.5%) . There were significant differences between the results of BOLD-fMRI and DCS of all 3 bilingual tasks(P < 0.017).


CONCLUSIONS
There are specific language areas in Chinese-English non-fluent late bilinguals. The BOLD-fMRI language mapping could not substitute DCS in the context of mapping language areas in bilinguals.
Department of Neurosurgery, Guangzhou General Hospital of Guangzhou Military Command, Guangzhou 510010, China.
Han
H
Gao
Hong-min
HM
Bai
Li-xin
LX
Han
Tian-dong
TD
Li
Wei
W
Wang
Yi-bing
YB
Liu
Jian
J
Lin
Xuan
X
Zeng
Guo-liang
GL
Wang
Yu-bao
YB
Wang
Li-min
LM
Wang
Xiao-peng
XP
Zhang
Email: gzwangwm@163.com.
Wei-min
WM
Wang
D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000601:surgery*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D055815:Young Adult