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Morphological processing in the preliterate bilingual brain
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Poster C95 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Xin sun1, Janice Chen2, Chloe Siu3, Janet Werker4; 1University of British Columbia
Morphological awareness, or the ability to understand and make use of units of words (morphemes), is an essential spoken language skill for language development and reading acquisition. Languages differ in morphological rules, thus languages may make up words in different ways. For example, Chinese makes up words mainly through compounding (i.e., snow-man), while English is more characterized by derivational morphology (i.e., read-er). As a result, young Chinese-English bilingual readers are found to show different brain mechanisms by showing enhanced left frontal activations when processing multi-morphemic words compared to English monolingual readers (Sun et al., 2022a, 2022b). Yet, what remains unknown is if these differences in brain functions between these readers come from their experience with the written languages, or if they can be rooted from before they learn to read. Indeed, behavioural evidence showed that children begin to recognize and make sense of word morphemes from as early as 4 years old. Thus, in the current study, we ask: How does the developing brain begin to support Chinese-English bilingual and English monolingual children’s emerging understanding of word morphemes prior to learning to read? Using fNIRS neuroimaging, we aim to measure functional brain activities during morphological word processing among preliterate children at 4-to-5 years old. Bilingual Chinese-English and monolingual English preliterate children completed a lexical morphology task that asked children to listen to three words and pick out the one (e.g., cupcake or stomachache) that “goes with” the target word (e.g., pancake). The ultimate full sample will be 120 (60 per group). Preliminary data (N = 18, M(SD)age = 5.18(0.5), 13 monolinguals) indicates that overall, both groups activate left frontal and middle temporal regions during the task compared to baseline. These regions are often associated with morpho-semantic processes, and results are consistent with prior research with reading-age children and adults. Moreover, Chinese-English bilinguals tend to engage more right frontal and middle temporal regions, whereas monolinguals tend to engage more left middle temporal regions during task versus baseline. If these results hold in the full sample, they may reflect potential differences in the strategies for breaking words into parts as well as accessing meanings for each part. The study will contribute to our understanding of how young bilingual and monolingual children process words with different morphological structures. This research will also further our understanding of how the brain adapts to different types of language input to support language acquisition and emerging literacy in children from linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Multilingualism