ArticleHuman brain mapping2023
Phonological and morphological literacy skills in English and Chinese: A cross-linguistic neuroimaging comparison of Chinese-English bilingual and monolingual English children.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review of functional near-infrared spectroscopy-based task paradigms in stroke rehabilitation.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Meanings within words: How Chinese bilingualism shapes the neural basis of English morphological processing in preschoolers.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Developmental changes in phonological awareness in Chinese-English bilingual children: An fNIRS longitudinal study.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Dynamic neuroplasticity of language networks: The intersection of bilingualism and epilepsy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Neural processing of children's theory of mind in a naturalistic story-listening paradigm.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- From similarity to conceptual-how pictophonetic Chinese characters facilitate inductive reasoning in 5-10-year-old children.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Neural substrates of L2-L1 transfer effects on phonological awareness in young Chinese-English bilingual children.NeuroImage · 2024Article
- Phonological and morphological literacy skills in English and Chinese: A cross-linguistic neuroimaging comparison of Chinese-English bilingual and monolingual English children.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- EEG N1 Specialization to Print in Chinese Primary School Students: Developmental Trajectories, Longitudinal Changes, and Individual Differences.Child developmentArticle
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Over the course of literacy development, children learn to recognize word sounds and meanings in print. Yet, they do so differently across alphabetic and character-based orthographies such as English and Chinese. To uncover cross-linguistic influences on children's literacy, we asked young Chinese-English simultaneous bilinguals and English monolinguals (N = 119, ages 5-10) to complete phonological and morphological awareness (MA) literacy tasks. Children completed the tasks in the auditory modality in each of their languages during functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging. Cross-linguistically, comparisons between bilinguals' two languages revealed that the task that was more central to reading in a given orthography, such as phonological awareness (PA) in English and MA in Chinese, elicited less activation in the left inferior frontal and parietal regions. Group comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals in English, their shared language of academic instruction, revealed that the left inferior frontal was less active during phonology but more active during morphology in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. MA skills are generally considered to have greater language specificity than PA skills. Bilingual literacy training in a skill that is maximally similar across languages, such as PA, may therefore yield greater automaticity for this skill, as reflected in the lower activation in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. This interpretation is supported by negative correlations between proficiency and brain activation. Together, these findings suggest that both the structural characteristics and literacy experiences with a given language can exert specific influences on bilingual and monolingual children's emerging brain networks for learning to read.
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