Monday, May 19, 2025
5/19/2025
Longitudinal trajectories of white matter and reading development in bilingual children - PROJECT SUMMARY Longitudinal neuroimaging studies have been instrumental in characterizing the developmental trajectories of brain networks and how specific neural pathways underlie the development of complex cognitive functions. Learning to read, which incorporates language abilities and the processes required to decode and comprehend language in written form, is key for academic and vocational advancement. Yet, experience-induced brain plasticity during development in bilingual children has either not been taken into account or has been explicitly excluded from existing work. The historical bias toward studying the neural bases of reading development in only monolingual children leaves uncertainty as to what extent these foundational studies can generalize to the increasingly diverse population of children in the U.S. In recent years, the number of bilingual children in schools has grown exponentially, currently comprising over 10% of all school-age children in the U.S. When bilinguals start English-only education, they are tasked with learning to read in English while simultaneously continuing to develop language proficiency in English. With language exposure split between two languages, these children enter formal schooling with an English-language disadvantage. This language disadvantage may contribute to the consistent reading achievement gap documented between white and Latinx children (who are over 70% bilingual). Since the neural pathways that underlie language and reading development necessarily overlap, it is critically important to understand how bilingualism and reading abilities interact to shape these white matter pathways across development. The field has gained valuable insights into the structural characteristics of the bilingual brain from studies of bilingual adults; however, few studies provide a critical developmental perspective on experience-induced brain plasticity. There is a dearth of evidence examining brain structural alterations in childhood associated with the bilingual experience. White matter pathways provide a vehicle to examine this experience-induced neuroplasticity. Language processing requires communication between distal brain regions, both cortical and subcortical. Similarly, lifelong experiences processing more than one language also affect white matter structural connectivity, but it is unclear how and when these changes happen during the development of language and reading abilities. To address the insufficient rigor of prior research, characterized by small samples and cross-sectional designs, the proposed work will leverage the large-scale longitudinal dataset from the NIH- funded Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (ABCD) to examine the development of white matter pathways over time while controlling for language and reading abilities in bilingual and monolingual children. The overarching goal of this proposal to disentangle how bilingualism and reading development shape brain structure during childhood over time and to reveal compensatory neural mechanisms associated with better outcomes in struggling bilingual readers.
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