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How learning to read a second language reshapes children’s visual and language cortices
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
Siyi Fan1, XiaoXia Feng1, GuoSheng Ding1; 1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University
Learning to read, a cultural invention, has been shown to profoundly modify the brain (Dehaene et al., 2015). While previous studies have predominantly focused on first language (L1) literacy acquisition, it remains unclear how learning to read a second language (L2), typically acquired after mastering reading in the native language, reorganizes children’s brain. To investigate how reading network for L2 emerge and interact with the existing L1 network at the earliest stage of L2 acquisition, we measured children’s neural responses to Chinese and English words (their native and second languages), as well as faces and houses, in three groups of children (N = 58) with varying levels of English learning experience: L2 pre-readers, L2 beginning readers, and L2 advanced readers. We first found that with increasing L2 experience, English-word-specific activation emerged in the left ventral visual area, and extended to the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), precentral gyrus (PreCG), and supplementary motor area (SMA). This activation may be associated with the effortful demand in phonological processing in L2. The top 10% most-responsive voxels in the classic visual word form area also exhibited significantly stronger responses to English words in both beginning and advanced readers compared to pre-readers. Furthermore, we observed that the number of English-word-specific voxels in the left ventral visual area initially increased and then decreased with accumulating L2 experience. These voxels also gradually shifted away from the peak activation site for Chinese words. In the left IPL, the number of English-word-specific voxels gradually increased with accumulating L2 experience, and their average distance from the peak of the Chinese-word-specific cluster became farther. At the individual level, both the left ventral visual area and IPL showed upward trends in the number of English-word-specific voxels from pre-readers to beginning readers. However, from beginning to advanced readers, voxel count showed a downward trend in the left ventral visual area but continued an increase tendency in the left IPL, suggesting a trend of functional shift in L2 processing with growing experience. Representational similarity analysis indicated that only advanced readers had formed a stable neural representation for English words in the left ventral visual area, whereas such stable neural representation was absent in pre- and beginning readers. The left IPL showed a gradual stabilization of English word representations with increasing L2 exposure, despite the absence of significant group-level differences. Together, these findings provide a picture of how the visual and language-related cortical networks in children dynamically reorganize in response to L2 learning, demonstrating how neural plasticity supports bilingual literacy development.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Reading