Brain activation for language and its relationship to cognitive and linguistic measures

Language learning and use are complex cognitive skills requiring domain-general cognition and sensori-motor skills, these also being important for numerical and music processing. Previous studies have explored behavioural associations across domains and neural underpinnings of specific abilities, yet less work has examined these questions together in the same participants. We collected data from 152 participants on behavioural measures of language, reading, multilingual experience, cognition, musicality, arithmetic, and motor skills, along with fMRI data during L1 story listening. Participants varied in multilingual language experience and reading aptitudes, including both typical (TRs) and dyslexic readers (DRs). Using multivariate Partial Least Squares correlation, we identified a main component linking cognitive, linguistic, and phonological measures to brain areas underlying lexico/semantics, combinatorial processing, and amodal semantic processing. A second analysis excluding DRs showed closer associations between cognitive/linguistic, literacy, phonological and memory processes within the same brain network as in the full sample. Here, we also isolated additional, complementary components, including one involving speed, automatization and lexical access, linked to auditory and motor brain areas. This suggests greater coherence and more integrated, ‘expert’ processing in TRs. This work is a first step in exploring complex relationships between language and non-linguistic functions that are important to it.