NOTE: This dataset is still under construction. Participants Participants for the English study were 51 young adults (32 females, mean age=21.3,SD=3.6) with no history of psychiatric, neurological or other medical illness that might compromise cognitive functions. They self-identified as native English speakers, and strictly qualified as right-handed on the Edinburgh handedness inventory (Oldfield 1971). All participants were paid, and gave written informed consent prior to participation, in accordance with the IRB guidelines of Cornell University. Chinese participants were 35 healthy, right-handed young adults (15 females, meanage=19.3, SD=1.6). They self-identified as native Chinese speakers, and had no history of psychiatric, neurological, or other medical illness that could compromise cognitive functions. All participants were paid, and gave written informed consent prior to participation, in accordance with the IRB guidelines of Jiangsu Normal University. French participants were 30 healthy, right-handed adults. They self-identifed as native French speakers and had no history of psychiatric, neurological, or other medical illness that could compromise cognitive functions. All participants gave written informed consent prior to participation, in accordance with the Regional Committee for the Protection of Persons involved in Biomedical Research. Experiment Procedure After giving their informed consent, participants were familiarized with the MRI facility and assumed a supine position on the scanner. Auditory stimuli were delivered through MRI-safe, high-fidelity headphones inside the head coil. The headphones were secured against the plastic frame of the coil using foam blocks. An experimenter increased the sound volume stepwise until the participants could hear clearly. The stimuli were divided into 9 sections, and each lasted for about 10 minutes. Participants listened passively to the 9 sections and completed 4 quiz questions after each section (36 questions in total). These questions were used to confirm their comprehension and were viewed by the participants via a mirror attached to the head coil and they answered through a button box. The entire session, including preparation time and practice, lasted for around 2.5 hours. Scanner Settings English and Chinese MRI images were acquired with a 3T MRI GE Discovery MR750 scanner with a 32-channel head coil. French MRI images were acquired with a 3T Siemens Magnetom Prisma Fit 230 scanner. Anatomical scans were acquired using a T1-weighted volumetric Magnetization Prepared RApid Gradient-Echo (MP-RAGE) pulse sequence. Facial structure was removed from anatomical scans before sharing publicly using Pydeface 2.0.0 (Gulban et al. 2019). Functional scans were acquired using a multi-echo planar imaging (ME-EPI) sequence with online reconstruction (TR=2000 ms; English and Chinese: TEs=12.8, 27.5, 43 ms; French:TEs=10, 25, 38 ms; FA=77◦; matrix size=72 x 72; FOV=240.0 mm x 240.0 mm; 2 x image acceleration; English and Chinese: 33 axial slices; French: 34 axial slices; voxel size=3.75 x 3.75 x 3.8 mm). Data Preprocessing All fMRI data were preprocessed using AFNI version 16 (Cox 1996). The first 4 volumes in each run were excluded from analyses to allow for T1-equilibration effects. Multi-echo independent components analysis (ME-ICA) (Kundu et al. 2012) were used to denoise data for motion, physiology and scanner artifacts. Images were then spatially normalized to the standard space of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) atlas, yielding a volumetric time series resampled at 2 mm cubic voxels for the English and Chinese data and 3.15 mm cubic voxels for the French data. These processed data files are available under the derivatives directory.