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Cross-language transfer of morphological processing in Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Xin sun1, Janet Werker1; 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 are early emerged. 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=162) 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). Results showed cross-language transfer that, bilingual experience with compound-heavy Chinese leads to more specialized brain activities during English compound processing by engaging stronger left middle temporal regions and less strong left inferior frontal regions in the Chinese bilinguals than English monolinguals. Moreover, English monolinguals showed more specialized brain basis during the affix processing with a stronger left superior temporal activation. These findings reflect 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,