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Brain bases of morphological processing in Chinese‐English bilingual children
Author(s) -
Ip Ka I,
Hsu Lucy ShihJu,
Arredondo Maria M.,
Tardif Twila,
Kovelman Ioulia
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12449
Subject(s) - psychology , neuroscience of multilingualism , linguistics , literacy , neuroscience , pedagogy , philosophy
Can bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? To answer this question, we investigated the brain bases of morphological awareness, one of the key spoken language abilities for learning to read in English and Chinese. Bilingual Chinese‐English and monolingual English children ( N = 22, ages 7–12) completed morphological tasks that best characterize each of their languages: compound morphology in Chinese (e.g. basket + ball = basketball) and derivational morphology in English (e.g. re + do = redo). In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left middle temporal region, suggesting that bilingual exposure to Chinese impacts the functionality of brain regions supporting semantic abilities. Similar to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal region [ BA 45] in English than Chinese, suggesting that young bilinguals form language‐specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and cross‐linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.