Similarities and differences in the neural representations of abstract concepts across English and Mandarin

Recent research suggests there is a neural organization for representing concepts that is common across English speakers. To investigate the possible role of language on the representation of concepts, multivariate pattern analytic (MVPA) techniques were applied to fMRI data to compare the neural representations of 28 individual concepts between native English and Mandarin speakers. Factor analyses of the activation patterns of the 28 concepts from both languages characterized this commonality in terms of a set of four underlying neurosemantic dimensions, indicating the degree to which a concept is verbally represented, internal to the person, contains social content, and is rule‐based. These common semantic dimensions (factors) underlying the 28 concepts provided a sufficient basis for reliably identifying the individual concepts from their neural signature in the other language with a mean rank accuracy of 0.65 (p