Brain bases of morphological processing in Chineseâ English bilingual children

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 Chineseâ English and monolingual English children (N = 22, ages 7â 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 languageâ specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and crossâ linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.The study investigated the impact of bilingual exposure on children’s language and reading abilities. During auditory morphological awareness tasks, young Chineseâ English bilinguals showed monolingualâ like competence as well as languageâ specific patterns of brain activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). This activation was greater for English than for Chinese in left IFG BA 45, but similar across languages in left IFG BA 47. Relative to English monolinguals, the bilinguals showed greater activation in left MTG region and this activation was significantly correlated with bilingualsâ English literacy. The findings suggest that bilingual exposure to a language with rich lexical morphology, such as Chinese, impacts the functionality of bilingualsâ left temporal regions typically associated with lexicoâ semantic processing and the ability to link word meanings to their orthographic forms.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138272/1/desc12449_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138272/2/desc12449.pd