Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Brain connectivity and maturation of the T-complex to lexical tone in bilingual Mandarin-English children
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Yan Yu1, Angela Cheng1, Anita Hyseni1, Benfamin Lee1, Valerie Shafer2; 1St. John's University, 2The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Individuals with various developmental disorders, including auditory processing disorders, frequently exhibit abnormalities in their cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) at temporal sites. Temporal CAEPs, also known as the T-complex, have been studied in monolingual and bilingual children with non-tonal language backgrounds. However, the developmental trajectories of the T-complex in bilingual children with tonal language backgrounds—such as those who speak both Mandarin and English—remain largely unknown. This study aims to investigate neurodevelopmental changes in Mandarin lexical tone processing, as reflected by the T-complex, in Mandarin-English bilinguals. We employed a multiple oddball paradigm and recorded event-related potentials using 65 sensors from bilingual adults and children aged 5 to 10. Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 2 (low rising) were used as deviant tones, while Tone 3 (low dipping) served as the standard. The analysis included data from 17 adults and 35 children, comprising 18 children aged 5–7 years and 17 children aged 8–10 years. We observed that the three subcomponents of the T-complex (Na, Ta, and Tb) were less well-formed in children compared to adults. Both groups of children showed significantly larger Na amplitudes than the adult group. Furthermore, the Ta and Tb components were difficult to identify in the left hemisphere in children across both age groups. These results suggest that the T-complex involved in lexical tone processing is not fully developed in bilingual children before the age of 10, and that the right hemisphere plays a more prominent role in lexical tone processing in bilingual children between 5 and 10 years of age. Results from source localization and brain connectivity analyses further advanced our understanding of the developmental trajectories of lexical tone processing in this bilingual population.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Language Development/Acquisition