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Longitudinal examination of white matter trajectories in typically developing bilingual and monolingual children
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Juliana Ronderos1,2, Jennifer Zuk2; 1Teachers College, Columbia University, 2Boston University
Longitudinal neuroimaging studies have been instrumental in characterizing how the developmental trajectories of brain pathways underlie the development of complex cognitive functions like reading, which are key for academic and vocational advancement. However, the unique patterns of brain development in bilingual children have either not been taken into account or have been explicitly excluded from existing work. Different aspects of bilingual experience (e.g., language switching) necessitate functional adaptations, which further engage areas subserving cognitive control and short-term memory, as posited by the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (Abutalebi & Green, 2007). Moreover, as suggested by the Dynamic Restructuring Model (Pliatsikas, 2020), these adaptations result in sequential structural changes to gray and white matter regions responsible for language, cognitive control, and short-term memory. Yet, theories of bilingualism do not account for how bilingualism and reading development interact and shape these brain structures during typical and atypical development. The present study examined developmental trajectories of language, reading, and cognitive control related white matter pathways (as measured by fractional anisotropy, FA) in bilingual and monolingual typically developing children, leveraging the large-scale longitudinal data set from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Three hundred and ninety-eight bilingual children (ages 9-12) and 398 monolingual peers matched on age, sex, parental education, household income, handedness, and nonverbal intelligence were selected for this analysis, revealing a complex association between white matter pathways’ development over time and children’s bilingual language exposure. Initial findings, using two timepoints of data for all children (at ages 9-10 and 11-12) and a third timepoint of data (at age 13-14) for approximately a third of the participants, indicate that across language, reading, and cognitive control pathways, bilingual children, as a group, show significantly lower FA values than monolingual peers at the baseline time point (i.e., 9-10 years old). This supports previous findings using this dataset (Ronderos et al., 2024), which is contrary to findings from bilingual adults who have significantly higher FA values than monolingual adults. Additionally, in line with the Dynamic Restructuring Model, the longitudinal data indicate more rapid FA growth for bilinguals than their monolingual peers two years later, when these children are 12 years old. This would suggest a slower growth in early childhood but accelerated growth through late childhood and early adolescence (i.e., 9-12+ years old) for white matter development in bilingual children compared to monolingual children in pathways related to language and cognitive control. Furthermore, bilingual language exposure seemed to influence both initial FA values at baseline (intercept) and rate of growth (slope) for FA in language-related pathways. Overall, initial findings suggest that language exposure may uniquely impact the development of underlying brain structures associated with language, reading and cognitive control in children who use more than one language. Additional analyses will be conducted with data from release 6.0 of the ABCD study (expected in Spring 2025), which will include complete cohort data for timepoint 3 and partial cohort data from timepoint 4 to enable robust growth curve analyses of these effects.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Language Development/Acquisition