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A smaller 'word' in a word? Morphological processing in the bilingual 4-5-year-olds' brain
Poster Session D, Saturday, October 26, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Xin sun1, Janet Werker2; 1University of British Columbia
Morphological awareness, or the ability to understand and use units of words (morphemes), is an essential language skill for reading development. Languages differ in morphological rules. For example, Chinese makes up words mainly through compounding (i.e., snow-man), while English is more characterized by affixes (i.e., read-er, fly-ing). It was found that Chinese-English bilingual young readers show different brain mechanisms than English monolingual readers when processing morphological units. Yet, what remains unknown is if these differences come from their experience with the written languages, or if they can be rooted from before reading. Indeed, behavioral evidence showed that children begin to show morphological awareness from as early as 4 years. Using fNIRS, the current study aimed to measure functional brain activities during morphological word processing among preliterate children. Bilingual Chinese-English and English monolingual children (N=140) completed a lexical morphology task in which they heard three words and picked out the one that “goes with” the target word (e.g., runner, water, dancer). Both groups activated the left frontal and middle temporal regions during the task. Moreover, while both groups showed similar activations when processing compounding words, Chinese-English bilinguals activated more left frontal regions compared to monolinguals only when processing affix structures (e.g., runn-er). These findings reflect potential differences in the strategies for breaking words into parts and accessing meanings for each part. This research will 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