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A longitudinal study of neural correlates of semantic processing in young Chinese-English bilingual children
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Poster C20 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Li-Ying Fan1, Hsin-Chin Chen2, Shiou-Yuan Chen3, Tai-Li Chou4; 1National Taipei University of Education, 2National Chung Cheng University, 3University of Taipei, 4National Taiwan University
Young bilingual children can use their languages differentially and appropriately in different language contexts, and their bilingual experiences may influence children’s neural circuitry for learning to read. Previous research has demonstrated that second language (L2) experiences lead to functional and structural neural adaptations (Abutalebi et al., 2011; Abutalebi and Green, 2016; Pliatsikas et al., 2017). Little is known about the developmental changes in cross-language transfer regarding brain activation in young Chinese-English bilingual children. The aim of the present study was to examine the impact of early bilingual exposure on young Chinese-English bilinguals during semantic processing. We conducted a longitudinal functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) study in 30 Chinese-English bilingual children to examine their brain activity in the semantic judgment task. All bilinguals had learned English before the age of 5, with a minimum of 1 year of English exposure before the first fNIRS scan. Participants were received the first fNIRS scan in their 1st-grade (mean age, 6.6 ± 0.3 years, age range 6.2–7.2) and a follow-up scan with an interval of 2 years (mean age, 8.6 ± 0.3 years, age range 8.1–9.1). They completed an auditory semantic judgement task in both Chinese and English. During the fNIRS imaging task, children heard two words and were asked to indicate if word pairs were related in meaning. The semantic judgment task included two levels of semantic difficulty requiring either high-association (easy) or low-association (difficult). The contrast of the low- versus high-association was defined to reveal the hemodynamic activity in semantic processing. Behavioral results showed that bilingual children were more accurate in both low- and high-association conditions for the 2nd than the 1st wave during the Chinese semantic task, and the same improvement was found during the English task. Compared to the 1st wave, bilinguals showed the developmental increase in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) during the Chinese semantic task in the 2nd wave, suggesting that they might have more elaborated semantic representations of Chinese over time. In addition, bilinguals showed the developmental increase in the right parietal regions during the English semantic task, suggesting that they might have increased engagement in the semantic network over time. Overall, our findings suggested that bilingual children show a relatively rapid development of semantic representations in the left pMTG for L1. Also, they used a compensatory mechanism in the right IPL, potentially to help their semantic processing for L2. These findings suggest bilingual children might develop different patterns of neural activity for semantic processing.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Meaning: Lexical Semantics