Effect of Picture-Book Reading With Additive Audio on Bilingual Preschoolers' Prefrontal Activation: A Naturalistic Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Chuanjiang Li,Keya Ding,Mingming Zhang,Dongchuan Yu,Jing Zhou,Li Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01939

Abstract

Acquiring a second language (L2) has the power to shape cognition and even the function and structure of the brain. Picture-book reading with additive audio (PRA) is a popular and convenient means of providing L2 exposure for non-balanced bilingual children; however, its contribution to bilingual children’s brain activity is unclear. This study conducted a rigorous bilingual word comprehension experiment and a naturalistic PRA task to explore the effect of L2 processing on brain activation among English as a foreign language (EFL) preschoolers, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found that the two contexts of comprehending English words and bilingual switching (BS), which impose more cognitive control demands, activated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) more than did the condition of comprehending Chinese words. Furthermore, the effect of PFC activity in the condition of picture-book reading with additive English audio (English PRA) was also found to be greater than in the condition of picture-book reading with additive Chinese audio (Chinese PRA); moreover, the effect was modulated by story difficulty. Finally, a positive correlation was shown between EFL children’s English competence and PFC activation through English PRA. This study indicates that the experiences of hearing L2 auditory stories in a picture-book reading activity yielded significant changes to early bilinguals’ PFC functional for cognitive control and language processing.

Highlights

In this era of globalization, more than half the world’s population speaks multiple languages, to some extent (Bialystok, 2017)
After controlling the variable of children’s months of age, repeated measure analyses of the three conditions of the BSC task showed that the condition of expressive communication (EC) displayed greater activation than did Chinese comprehension (CC) on channels 1, 9, 14, 16, and 18 using a 0.0025 (0.05/20) alpha level of significance (20 channels), covered with bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
Children’s English competence, especially in terms of their auditory comprehension (AC) ability, was correlated with activation of the left IFG (Ch. 6) and bilateral DLPFC (Ch. 7, 9, 15, 19) in the English Picture-book reading with additive audio (PRA) tasks. This present study was designed to explore whether L2 processing affected the functionality of English as a foreign language (EFL) preschoolers’ cortical brain regions for domain-general cognitive control and language processing

Summary

Introduction

In this era of globalization, more than half the world’s population speaks multiple languages, to some extent (Bialystok, 2017). The rapid development of neuroimaging technologies – i.e., event-related potential (ERP), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), etc., – has made it possible to depict the relative contribution of bilingual experience to the brain and mind (Kroll, 2015; García-Pentón et al, 2016) Using those new techniques, emerging studies have found some general frameworks for the bilingual effect on neural architecture from the perspectives of both functional reorganization (Abutalebi and Green, 2007; Arredondo et al, 2019b; Li et al, 2019) and structural restructuration, such as gray matter density (Mechelli et al, 2004), white matter integrity (Mohades et al, 2015), and cortical thickness (Klein et al, 2014). Neuroplasticity in the bilingual brain should not come as a surprise, given such evidence of experience-based neuroplasticity (Hernandez et al, 2019) as differences in the hippocampi of a taxi driver and a bus driver (Maguire et al, 2000, 2006)

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