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Neural substrates of morphological processing in Chinese-English bilingual children
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Poster C27 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Wei-Hung Lin1, Shiou-Yuan Chen2, Li-Ying Fan3, Hsin-Chin Chen4, Syuan-Yu Lin1, Tai-Li Chou1; 1National Taiwan University, 2University of Taipei, 3National Taipei University of Education, 4National Chung Cheng University
This study aims to investigate the influence of bilingualism on children’s neural architecture of reading development. We explore this inquiry by focusing on bilingual children’s morphological awareness. Due to the structural differences in morphology between Chinese and English, the neural substrates of morphological processing could reflect the cross-linguistic transfer effects on children’s literacy development. To examine the influence of cross-linguistic differences on bilingual development, we recruited 29 Chinese monolingual and 33 Chinese-English bilingual first graders to complete an auditory morphological judgment task during fNIRS (functional Near Infracted Spectroscopy) neuroimaging. During the imaging task, participants heard three spoken words in a sequential order and were instructed to choose the word that shared a morphemic root or derivational affix with the first word, as compared to the phonologically similar distractor. In the Chinese task, all stimuli involved two characters, one of which had the same sound across the target, answer, and distractor words. On the other hand, all the stimuli were single English words in the English task. Monolingual participants completed the task in Chinese and bilingual participants completed the task in both Chinese and English. fNIRS results revealed the language-specific effect, with bilingual children eliciting stronger activation over the right hemisphere in the English relative to Chinese task. This finding suggests that bilingual children require additional cognitive resources to process English morphology, the second language. Additionally, the results demonstrated the cross-language transfer effect. Compared to monolinguals, bilingual children showed stronger activation over the left posterior superior/middle temporal gyrus in the Chinese task, suggesting a larger reliance on sound-and-meaning integration during morphological processing. Overall, the findings suggest that bilingual children employ different neural circuities for processing each language, and that exposure to the language with different structure influences the processing strategies for the literacy development.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Morphology