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Neural Specialization for Word Recognition in Monolingual and Bilingual Children
Poster Session E, Sunday, September 14, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Nuo Chen1, Valeria Caruso1, Xiaosu Hu1, Twila Tardif1, James Booth2, Ioulia Kovelman1; 1University of Michigan, 2Vanderbilt University
Children’s literacy development is closely tied to the fine-tuning of neural systems for language. As children develop, these systems become increasingly specialized for processing language meaning and structure. Cross-linguistically, this neurodevelopmental process may be influenced by learning to read in different types of orthographies. For instance, as compared to English, Chinese emphasizes character meanings at the level of lexical morphology, whereas Spanish relies more heavily on phonology and sound-to-letter mappings. Neurodevelopmental theories, such as Interactive Specialization, suggest that interactions between the competing neural systems and their interactions with the environment and the learning experiences shape the developing neurocircuitry (Johnson, 2011). Bilingualism is a common variation in learning experiences. Cross-linguistic transfer theories posit that experiences with structurally distinct languages and orthographies can influence children’s emerging neural and cognitive architecture for learning to read (Chung et al., 2019). Guided by these frameworks, we asked two questions. First, how is children's reading fluency related to neural specialization for meaning and structure (i.e., the ventral and dorsal pathways) in bilingual and monolingual children? Second, how does bilingual experience with structurally distinct home languages interact with young bilingual children’s emerging neural specialization for learning to read in their primary academic language? We predicted that children with stronger reading skills would show greater specialization along the dorsal and ventral neural pathways for learning to read. We further hypothesized that Chinese-English bilinguals would exhibit stronger specialization along the ventral system, whereas Spanish-English bilinguals would show stronger specialization along the dorsal system. To test these predictions, we examined young English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, and Spanish-English bilinguals (N=286, n ≈ 100 per group, average age = 7), attending English-only U.S. schools, with heritage language exposure maintained through family and community programs. During Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) neuroimaging, children completed English-language phonological onset-rime detection and lexical root-compound morphology tasks, designed to engage the dorsal and ventral pathways, respectively. Our findings regarding specificity partially supported our predictions. More fluent readers demonstrated stronger activation in the left dorsal IFG during phonology and stronger activation in the left posterior STG and angular gyrus during morphology. Notably, across all groups, the morphology task elicited greater engagement of language networks than the phonology task. This is likely because morphological processing draws on both phonological segmentation and lexico-semantic retrieval. These results suggest that while morphology engages broader language systems, better readers show more targeted neural specialization for the subprocesses of language. In terms of bilingualism, Chinese-English bilinguals showed the strongest specificity effects, with enhanced left pSTG activation during morphology and stronger left supramarginal gyrus activation during phonology. These findings advance theoretical perspectives on language and literacy by revealing how distinct language subprocesses recruit specialized neural pathways and how this specialization is linked to reading proficiency. The findings further advance bilingualism perspectives by illustrating how language-specific structures influence the development of neural pathways through cross-linguistic transfer. The findings thus help inform cognitive and neurodevelopmental perspectives that aim at explaining literacy development across languages and learners.
Topic Areas: Reading, Language Development/Acquisition