Presentation
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What’s in the Sound? fNIRS neuroimaging reveals cross-linguistic differences in neural organization for phonological awareness in Spanish-English bilingual learners.
Poster C43 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Nia Nickerson1, Kehui Zhang2, Chi-Lin Yu3, Xin Sun4, Rachel Eggelston5, Teresa Satterfield6, Ioulia Kovelman7; 1University of Michigan
How does the developing bilingual brain build foundational literacy skills for each of the child’s languages? Phonological awareness helps children map language sounds onto letters, thereby providing a foundational stepping stone to literacy development across languages. Theories of bilingualism pose that phonological awareness is a linguistically-shared skill that offers a common foundation for dual-language literacy development. We tested the neuro-cognitive bases of this theoretical assumption by asking Spanish-English bilingual heritage language learners raised in the US to complete phonological awareness tasks in each of their languages during functional Near Infrared Neuroimaging (fNIRS), along with behavioral literacy measures (n = 48, Mage= 8.2(1.4)). In our methodological description, we detail an efficient fNIRS neuroimaging approach, a portable/accessible/low-cost neuroimaging method - and as it applies to studying populations underrepresented in neuroimaging research. In Spanish and in English, the neuroimaging task engaged the phonological neural network, including left frontal and temporal regions - supporting the idea of language-common neural organization for phonological processing across bilinguals’ two languages. Nevertheless, brain-behavior correlation revealed a positive association between left temporal/STG activation phonological proficiency during the Spanish task and a negative association between left STG and phonological proficiency during the English task. We follow-up on these findings with person-specific functional connectivity approach for each of the children’s languages using the Group Iterative Multiple Model Estimation (GIMME) to reveal cross-linguistic differences in functional organization for phonological processing in bilinguals’ two languages and its association with dual-language proficiency. Taken together, the results suggest that bilingual children’s neural architecture for spoken language skills that are foundational to literacy reflect cross-linguistic differences between the children’s two languages and their experiences with those languages. The findings thus inform theories of bilingualism and those of dual language literacy development.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Phonology and Phonological Working Memory